


You and I Both Know that the House Is Haunted

by marycontraire



Series: Homecoming [1]
Category: Generation Kill
Genre: But probably not the kid fic you’re looking for, Canon-Typical Homophobia, Class Issues, Future Fic, Gen, Internalized Homophobia, Kid Fic, M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Welcome to the most on-brand thing I’ve ever written
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-09
Updated: 2019-09-27
Packaged: 2020-06-25 13:40:29
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 40,159
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19746880
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/marycontraire/pseuds/marycontraire
Summary: October, 2014:  Gunnery Sergeant Evan Stafford drives from Camp Pendleton to St. Louis for the first time in more than a decade.  He brings the worst of his ghosts with him, only to find that John is still harboring a few of his own.





	1. Part I: Chapter One

**Author's Note:**

> What to say about this monstrosity? I’ve been trying to write a sequel to _Tear Down the House_ essentially since I finished it, and somehow none of the previous iterations ever quite worked. I had fully abandoned the notion until, by chance, last year I happened to watch Wilson Bethel in _Daredevil 3_ just a few weeks after I watched Debra Granik’s haunting and deeply under appreciated film _Leave No Trace_. (I highly recommend both to anyone who hasn’t seen them.) Somehow, the combination of the two clicked something in my mind and the story started to unravel. Of course, that was nearly a year ago, and it’s been rather like pulling teeth to finish it; much thanks to SDS for her well-intentioned and surprisingly effective bullying. 
> 
> This is NOT a work in progress; all chapters save the epilogue have already been written. I’m posting as I finish final revisions and edits, so you can probably expect chapters posted every few days, maybe even every day if I’m remarkably quick.
> 
> Thanks so much to Sharksdontsleep and Lake for being my beta readers.

_You and I both know that the house is haunted;_   
_You and I both know that the ghost is me._   
_You used to catch me in your bed-sheets, just a-rattling your chains;_   
_Well back then, baby, it didn’t seem so strange._

_Even when one is dead and gone,_   
_It still takes two to make a house a home._   
_Well, I’m as lonesome as the catacombs._   
_I hear you call my name but no one's there_   
_Except a feeling in the air._

_You and I both know that the house is haunted;_   
_You and I both know that the ghost is you._   
_You used to walk around screaming, and slamming all them doors --_   
_Well, I’m all grown up now: I don’t scare easy no more._

\--Shakey Graves, “Dearly Departed”

_  
___  
  
  
  
  
  
  
**October, 2014**  


Dad leaves a duffel bag and her camping backpack in her room. He tells her to only pack what she needs, and she sort of listens. She packs the things she needs first: enough socks and underwear for a week with no laundry, light insulating layers that don’t stay wet when they get wet, jeans, leggings, go-fasters, hair elastics, toothbrush and hair brush, her soft shell jacket, multi-tool, and water bottle. She’s wearing her hiking boots, so she doesn’t need to pack those.

“Mac,” Dad says, poking his head back through her door, “give me your f- your fancy black dress and I’ll put in the garment bag with my dress blues.”

He means her funeral dress. Mac fetches it from the closet.

“Make sure you pack the shoes that go with it,” Dad says, and he disappears back down the hall.

Mac does so, albeit resentfully. She had wanted to get black flats to go with her funeral dress, preferably sparkly ones, but Dad had said that they didn’t have arch support, so she got stuck with some ugly, old fashioned shoes with a strap across the top. When she’s done, there’s still some space left for stuff that she doesn’t need but wants. She chooses carefully: her seashell collection (carefully preserved in tissue paper in a shoebox), her fancy hair clips, her lucky sweater, and, most important, her sketchbook and art set with the proper pencils, charcoals, and color pastels.

The rest goes out to the yard. Sergeant Aikins from down the road buys their TV and the stand for it. Corporal Daniels buys their couch. Their cooking tools disappear pretty quickly, too, and Dad’s gently-used gear. Dad puts some of the cash in his wallet and the rest in an envelope that he locks in the truck’s glove compartment, where he keeps his sidearm. Then he drives the stuff that people didn’t buy to the charity donation bin and reloads the bed of the truck with the camping gear and the bags they’re keeping. He covers everything with a tarp and secures it with bungee cords. (Dad loves bungee cords.)

Mac is supposed to help with this but doesn’t, and Dad doesn’t object. Instead, she wanders through the now-empty rooms of the house that she’s lived in most of her life (except for the months she lived with the Garzas). It doesn’t look like home at all anymore. Soon -- maybe by the end of this week, even -- another family will live here.

“Mac?” Dad calls from the front door. “Time to get going, Skipper. We need to return the keys to the Housing Office before we get out of here.”

Mac doesn’t look back when Dad locks the door behind them for the last time; she just climbs into the passenger side of the truck. Dad follows her around before she shuts the door. “You’re doing comms and navigation,” he says, and he hands her his cell phone and a paper map.

Mac makes a face. “If I had an iPhone, we could just use Google maps.”

“Nice try, but you’re still not getting a phone of any kind until seventh grade,” Dad says.

“If you had an iPhone, we could use Google maps.”

“I don’t need an iPhone. No one needs an iPhone. It’s better to learn how to read real maps. What if you were lost somewhere with no power?”

Mac just shrugs; she knew that was coming, anyway. It doesn’t take her very long to find Camp Pendleton on the road map of Southern California. Dad hands her a pencil and she circles it. “Where are we going tonight?” she asks.

“Joshua Tree.”

They’ve been camping there before, so she finds it without too much trouble, and circles it.

“Good work, kiddo,” Dad says. “What’s our route?”

Mac chews on the pencil as she considers, a habit Mrs. Nolan, her fourth grade teacher, has been trying to break her of. She supposes she’ll have to get used to another fourth grade teacher now, but if she’s lucky maybe not for a while. “We could take I-215 or I-5. I-215 looks a little shorter, but if we take I-5 we can maybe see the ocean in some places.”

“You’re the navigator,” Dad reminds her.

“I-5,” Mac says decisively. She wants to get a good last look at the Pacific. She doesn’t know how long they’ll be in Joshua Tree or where they’re going after or if they’re coming back to Oceanside or even to Southern California.

“I-5 it is then,” Dad says. “Wanna do the music, too, Skipper?”

Mac nods vigorously, and Dad drags the shoebox full of cassette tapes out from the passenger-side footwell. The truck is so old that it only plays tapes or the radio -- no Bluetooth -- so the car music is all in there. The inside-the-house is music is on vinyl records. Dad takes music way more seriously than everybody elses’ dads who just listen to Spotify playlists -- it’s one of those rare instances where someone is so lame and old-fashioned that it sort of comes all the way around to being cool. Mac wonders if Dad put the records in the back of the truck or if he decided that he didn’t need them when he packed. She hopes he brought them.

When Dad gets in his side of the truck and starts it up, he cautions, “I am not listening to that one Lauryn Hill album over and over for three hours.”

“What about Taylor Swift?” she asks, but she unfortunately can’t keep a straight face.

“If you start listening to that top twenty country crossover crap, I will disown you,” Dad says emphatically. His accent gets even more Southern when he’s being a drama queen, which makes Mac laugh.

She really is planning to play Lauryn Hill, but to appease Dad she finds the cassette of Ice Cube’s _The Predator_ first. She can’t skip songs because it’s a tape, but the wait is worth it. When they get to the seventh track, they’re already driving north on the highway and they both rap along really loud with the whole thing (except the bad words): “Today I didn't even have to use my A.K.! I got to say it was a good day!”

When Mac looks over at Dad, he’s smiling his real smile.

. . . . . . . . . . . .

The sun is already starting to set when they get to the place Dad likes to camp in Joshua Tree. It’s pretty deserted, which is probably why Dad likes it. Mac moves to follow Dad out of the truck, but he stops her. “Gonna do some quick recon,” he says. “You stay in here. Keep the doors locked. Don’t talk to anyone until I come back.” He unlocks the glove compartment and takes out the two handheld two-way radios and his sidearm. He hands her one of the radios. “I’m on channel six. How’s your battery?”

Mac turns it on and checks the display. “It’s still got half left.”

“Alright, that’s fine for now, but keep an eye on it and let me know when you’re down to a quarter, got it?”

Mac nods, and Dad sets out to assess the campsite. Mac turns sideways to watch the sky change colors behind the rocks and weird desert trees. She wants to get out of the truck, stretch her legs out, and get a better look, but Dad said to stay in the truck with the doors locked, so she doesn’t. She also can’t turn Lauryn Hill back on, because the truck is turned off and Dad took the keys with him.

She tries to be patient, but when Dad isn’t back after her watch says ten minutes have passed, she decides to raise him on the radio. She makes sure she’s on the right channel, then presses down the button to talk. “Q-tip Actual, this is Q-tip One. I’m hungry and I want to get out of the truck. How copy?” she says. The radio chirps when she takes her finger off the button.

Dad’s reply comes, scratchy but audible, a few seconds later. “Q-tip One, maintain your position. Over.”

Mac rolls her eyes, which Dad can’t see over the radio. “Interrogative: how much longer until you get back? Over.”

“Five mikes. Keep the doors locked. Over.”

Mac really is hungry, so when Dad gets back, she takes care of laying the ground tarp and pitching the tent while he builds a fire for dinner. It’s one of those easy tents that sort of pops itself, so she can handle it. When she’s done, she sits down next to Dad on top of her sleeping bag, which is still in its compression sack, and takes a swig of water from her bottle.

“Here, eat these while you wait,” Dad says, and he hands her a Ziploc full of baby carrots. As a rule, Mac isn’t crazy about vegetables, but she really is hungry, and carrots are much better than lettuce or something else gross and green. Dad is heating canned chili in the cook pot over the fire. He’s already put the cans in the trash bag that they’ll take with them; ‘leave no trace’ is a camping rule.

“What are we doing after dinner?” Mac asks as Dad serves the food into their camping bowls.

“After dinner you got some homework, Skipper,” Dad says around a mouthful of chili.

Mac groans and dramatically collapses off her sleeping bag perch and onto the ground.

“Don’t start with me, kid, you weren’t even in school today. Mrs. Nolan gave us a coursework schedule and you’re sticking to it.”

Morosely, Mac sits back on the sleeping bag and finishes her chili, scraping her plate so she doesn’t have to carry out any food. Dad is already looking through her backpack for the printout Mrs. Nolan gave him after her last school day. “You gotta do pages twenty-three through twenty six in your math workbook, read twenty minutes in your nonfiction book and write something called boxes and bullets in your notebook? I don’t know what that means; do you know what that means?”

Mac nods miserably.

“And then you have to read your fiction book for twenty minutes… with four post-it notes? You know what that means?”

Mac nods again. “Daaaaaaad,” she whines. “That is so much work.”

“It does sort of seem like a lot,” Dad agrees grimly. “Tell you what -- if you can get this done by eight-thirty, I just might find some marshmallows in the food bag. Think you can get it done, Skipper?”

Mac manages to do everything except the fiction reading, which she hates the most. Dad lets her have the marshmallows anyway on the condition that she reads for twenty minutes before she sleeps, so she takes _Mr. Popper’s Penguins_ into the tent with her and reads it sitting up in her sleeping bag with her headlamp on.

“Warm enough?” Dad asks. “I can get another layer from the truck.”

Mac shrugs. “My sleeping bag is fine.”

“Got water?”

“Yep.”

“If you need to go to the bathroom in the night, what do you do?”

“Wake you up so you know where I am.”

“You know what to do if I make noise and wake you up?”

“Get where you can’t reach me and pull on your ankle.” Mac suspects that she won’t need to do this: Dad always sleeps better in the desert than inside a house. It’s one of the reasons they like camping so much, even though they never talk about it.

“Alright, get some sleep, kid. We gotta get up early tomorrow.” Dad switches off her headlamp and slides it off her head, instantly plunging their tent into darkness. Mac settles into the familiar embrace of her sleeping bag, which is skinnier near her feet and wider near her shoulders.

“Are we going somewhere?” she asks in the general direction of where she knows Dad to be.

“Phoenix,” Dad says. “Got a funeral to go to.”

Mac had figured as much -- Dad made her pack the dress, after all.

“Whose funeral?” she asks, even though it’s unlikely she knows him personally -- if he lived at Pendleton and had kids, this wouldn’t be the first she’s heard of it.

“Corporal Cruz,” Dad says. “One of my men from my last deployment.” Dad means someone from his platoon -- his last few deployments he’s been a platoon sergeant, which is the second most in-charge person in the platoon, after the platoon commander. The weird thing is, platoon commanders are officers and always younger than Dad -- sometimes even by several years. She’s met all of Dad’s platoon commanders for the last couple of years, and she can always tell whether he respects them or not right away, even though he never says bad stuff about other grown-ups in front of her.

“He die in combat or at home?” she asks.

Dad takes a while to answer. “At home,” he says at last, quietly. “Now get some sleep.”

Mac knows that Corporal Cruz didn’t die in a car accident or from getting sick. Dad would have said if he did.

. . . . . . . . . . . .

It’s still dark when Dad wakes her up for PT. At least she’s already wearing leggings and a t-shirt, so she doesn’t have to change except to put on her go-fasters. First they do stretches, then crunches, then planks. Then Dad does the really hard kind of push ups where he basically jumps with his arms, which Mac is supposed to skip. She tries one, but, as usual, it doesn’t work out, so she takes a break. The run Dad takes her on is way shorter than usual; maybe because it’s still not really light and the terrain isn’t flat, or maybe because they just need to get on the road to Arizona soon. When they get back, they break camp.

“What about breakfast?” Mac asks.

“We’ll stop somewhere off the road,” Dad says.

Mac is hungry now, but she doesn’t say anything because breakfast at a restaurant means she can order what she wants -- maybe even hot chocolate if Dad stays in an okay mood. It doesn’t matter anyway; once they’ve got all the gear stowed in the bed of the truck, Dad yanks a banana and a plum out of the food bag. “I bet I know which one you want,” he says.

Mac wrinkles her nose and points emphatically at the banana. “Plums are a _lunch fruit,”_ she says.

Dad, predictably, laughs. “Fruits do not have a time of day, Skipper. I don’t know how you got so neurotic.”

“Nature or nurture,” Mac says. “Either way, it’s your fault.”

Dad eats the plum, Mac eats the banana, and they both wash off using the biodegradable soap and rainwater from the tank in the bed of the truck. Then Dad drags out the garment bag and Mac has to put on her stupid funeral dress. Admittedly, it’s probably more comfortable than the dress blues Dad puts on. Mac’s funeral shoes are starting to pinch her toes, which means she’s outgrowing them. She decides not to mention it now, though -- maybe it will be a few months before the next funeral.

Dad tries to braid her hair, but she stops him. “It’s not comfortable to have a braid sticking out when I put my head back against the seat in the truck,” she tells him.

“Can I put a little of it up in the front?” Dad asks, scrunching up his nose. “Your hair gets mad messy if we just leave it.” This is true: Mac’s hair is nearly long enough for her to sit on.

“Fine,” Mac acquiesces. “But only if the elastic is on top of my head so it doesn’t get in the way when I lean my head back.”

They drive for another hour before Dad pulls off into a diner, and Dad spends much of that time cross-examining her about the appropriate times to eat various fruits.

“Apples?”

“Lunch or snack.”

“Blueberries?”

“Breakfast.”

“Peaches?”

“With the skin on, a really good snack. With the skin off, after-dinner dessert.”

“Raspberries?”

“Trick question. They can be breakfast or dessert.”

When at last Dad drives into the parking lot of a diner, Mac is properly hungry again. He steps in ahead of her, doing some quick recon on all the other diners, and Mac knows to wait and not come in until he gestures for her. It’s not very crowded, which is good. That’s why they avoid places like McDonald’s. When a tired-looking waitress materializes to seat them, Mac beats a determined path to the empty four-person table in the back corner with sightlines to the front door and the kitchen door and an easy view of the entire dining area. Getting the right table is always easier when she takes the lead: of course it’s Dad who really needs to sit here, but waitresses tend to expect grown men to be reasonable about seating limitations. They’re much more wary of little girls throwing tantrums. This waitress doesn’t seem to care at all -- the room is only a third full.

The menu is very long, even just the breakfast section, but it’s been helpfully divided into sections with bolded titles. Mac’s Resource Room Reading Group taught her all about using section headings to read nonfiction, so she is basically an expert. She knows that the _From the Griddle_ section really means pancakes and waffles, so she looks there first.

“May I have chocolate chip pancakes?” she says in her most polite voice, the one she uses when she’s staying with the Garzas during deployment and they have guests over.

Dad doesn’t even look up from his menu. “If all you eat is sugar, you’re going to be starving again in two hours, and I don’t want you whining during a funeral service. Get some protein.”

Mac rolls her eyes; fortunately this is lost on Dad, who’s still looking at the menu even though Mac already knows what he’ll order. “You mean, get some eggs.”

“Eggs have protein. So does yogurt.”

“I’ll get eggs,” Mac says. Who orders yogurt at a diner?

“Good choice,” Dad says.

“May I get hot chocolate?”

Dad gives her a look.

“You’re going to drink, like, six cups of coffee. There’s no way that’s better for you than one cup of hot chocolate.”

“Fine, you win this round,” Dad says, and he gives the waitress their order: normal scrambled eggs for Mac, scrambled egg whites with onions, tomatoes, and jalapeños for dad, and turkey bacon for both of them. Mac gets really lucky, too; this is one of those places that serves eggs with those little potatoes that are basically like breakfast french fries.

Dad gives her a stern look when he sees her emptying a significant reservoir of ketchup onto her plate by banging on the “57” below the glass bottle’s neck. “Eggs first,” he says. Mac eats them in the biggest bites she can manage so that they won’t interrupt her enjoyment of having hot chocolate with breakfast french fries. Honestly, Dad’s eggs are better. Mac hates onions and egg whites, so when he’s cooking for both of them he usually compromises by making one whole egg to every two whites and adding tomatoes and jalapenos but not onions. She’s gotten sort of used to that.

They get back on the road pretty quickly after they finish, though Dad makes her use the bathroom in the diner because he doesn’t want to be turning off at every rest stop between here and Phoenix. The diner is big enough that they actually have separate Ladies’ and Gentlemen’s bathrooms (with cheesy 1950s signs on the front), but instead of just meeting back at the front when they’re finished, Dad insists on standing guard outside the Ladies’ room while Mac pees, and then she has to stand outside the Gentlemen’s room waiting for him where he can hear her, just in case something bad happens. It is not an efficient use of their time, but Mac knows better than to argue.

On the road, Dad lets her listen to the whole Lauryn Hill album all the way through again even though he just heard it yesterday. Mac still has to change tapes a few times, though, because it’s a long way to Phoenix. They also listen to _Country Grammar,_ the censored version, A Tribe Called Quest, and some ‘old school’ Jay-Z, from ages before he was married to Beyonce. Mac doesn’t even remember a time before Jay-Z was married to Beyonce.

Once they enter Phoenix city limits, Mac has to switch to a different map and pay extra close attention until they find the correct church and pull into the parking lot. There is already a crowd of people wearing dark clothes streaming through the tall doors to the church -- it looks Catholic, just from the outside -- but Dad and Mac stop to check each others’ clothing to make sure they don’t look like they just slept outside in the desert and washed from a portable water tank, even though that’s exactly what they did. Dad insists on re-brushing Mac’s hair and putting it in a half-ponytail again, and Mac has to brush some _actual_ dirt off Dad’s shoulder, which is _extremely_ funny because they were just listening to _The Black Album_ , but Dad does not laugh at all because he is already sad about Corporal Cruz who is dead and whose funeral they are about to go to.

They stay in one of the back rows during the service; the church seems very full to Mac. Afterwards, everyone goes back to Corporal Cruz’s mother’s house for a wake. By the front door, there’s a book for everyone to write their ‘condolences’ and a picture of Corporal Cruz smiling in his dress blues. Dad, in his own dress blues but not smiling, stoops to sign it. Mac hates wakes; everyone talks really quietly and they organize themselves into clumps in all the hallways so it’s impossible to move anywhere. She never knows what to say to the family of the person who’s just died, so mostly she tries to find a helpful chore that excuses her from conversations. Her usual go-to is herding all of the small children into an unused room and distracting them with Netflix Kids if there’s a TV and some non-noisy game if there isn’t, but this isn’t Camp Pendleton and she doesn’t know these kids.

When Dad finally gets the opportunity to introduce himself to Corporal Cruz’s parents, Mrs. Cruz starts crying and Mr. Cruz traps him in some serious conversation about how much Corporal Cruz respected him. This, Mac knows, is Dad’s funeral nightmare, but she can’t really help him with it, so she leaves him standing super-straight and clenching his jaw and ducks into the crowd of grown-ups. She begins a project of grabbing the little paper plates and plastic glasses people are abandoning everywhere and carrying them to the kitchen to deter people from asking who she is and how she knows the deceased. She’s drawing a little attention regardless; it seems like most of the non-Marines here are Mexican, and her white-blonde hair makes her stand out. She hears a few people ask each other in Spanish whose kid she is. Mac actually does speak Spanish because of living with the Garzas when Dad was deployed, but she’s found that sometimes it’s better to pretend she doesn’t.

It takes Dad a while to finish talking to the Cruzes and all of the other Marines from his last platoon that he needs to say reassuring things to. When he does, he finds her in the kitchen, where she is fervently wishing she were anywhere else. She’d rather be in school. She’d rather be in school taking a _writing test_ on _Mr. Popper’s Penguins,_ which she hasn’t even finished reading. When she sees him, she wraps her arms around his stomach and squashes her face into his chest, even though it’s kind of uncomfortable because of the brass buttons and the horrible fabric of his uniform.

“Hey, Skipper,” Dad says, wrapping his arms around her shoulders. “You eat anything?”

Mac doesn’t look up, just shakes her head into his chest. “I don’t want to eat the sad people food,” she mumbles.

“I hear you, kid,” Dad says.

“Can I take off the funeral dress?” she says.

“Yeah, just, not here, though. We’ll find a rest stop to change in.”

Mac nods.

Behind her, someone -- Mac thinks it’s one of Corporal Cruz’s aunts -- exclaims, “Oh, is this your daughter, Gunnery Sergeant Stafford? She’s been so polite!” Mac extricates her face from the front of Dad’s uniform and looks at the woman -- definitely Corporal Cruz’s aunt -- who continues, “My goodness, she looks just like you.”

“Yes, we’ve heard that before, ma’am,” Dad says.

“It’s mostly just the hair,” Mac says, because it’s true: that’s pretty much all people see when they look at her. Her classmates have spent the last month and a half convincing her that she _has_ to dress up as Elsa from _Frozen_ for Halloween or it would basically be a crime against the school’s costume parade. Mac is probably not even going to the costume parade now.

“I hope you didn’t have to come all the way from California just for this, dear,” Corporal Cruz’s aunt says.

“Oh no,” Dad says. “We’re actually on our way back east to St. Louis to stay with family for a while.”

“Well I hope you have a good time,” she says to Mac. To Dad, she says, “Thank you so much for everything you did -- tried to do -- for Luis.”

Mac can feel Dad’s arms tighten around her shoulders. “Ma’am,” he says. He doesn’t say anything else.

. . . . . . . . . . . .

Dad says they’re driving straight through the rest of the way, so at the rest stop he buys Ripped Fuel, No Doze, a power bar, beef jerky and a large coffee, which is basically the grown-up equivalent of eating raw cookie dough for dinner. Mac wants a grilled cheese sandwich, but Dad says no because sometimes if she has dairy before a car ride she throws up. She has to get ham with just tomato and no cheese instead. It is only tolerable because she squirts three spicy mustard packets onto it.

“I don’t think I ate mustard when I was a kid,” Dad observes as she does this.

“You were a stupid kid, then,” Mac says.

Once again, Dad waits outside the Ladies’ room while she changes into leggings and her fleece pullover, and she has to wait outside the Men’s room while he re-hangs his dress blues with extreme care (or at least extreme slowness).

In the truck, before she dives back into the tape box, she asks, “Are we really going to St. Louis to stay with family?”

Dad takes a while to answer. “Sort of,” he finally says.

“How is that a ‘sort of?’ It’s a yes or no question, Gunny,” she says.

Dad grimaces; she’s not sure if it’s because she’s giving him lip or because he doesn’t like the answer he’s going to give. “We are going to St. Louis,” he says, which is clearly the answer she’s least interested in.

“Do we have family there?” Mac asks. “I thought your whole family was in Florida.” Mac doesn’t know Dad’s family very well. Apparently when she was a baby and Mom and Dad were still married, they visited Dad’s mom and stepdad in Tampa and she met everybody, but she doesn’t remember that, and Dad no longer speaks to his mom and stepdad. He does still call his little half-brother and sisters on their birthdays and Christmas and send them presents -- or Amazon gift cards, anyway -- but that’s about it. His sister visited for a weekend last year when she graduated high school and moved to L.A. to try to be an actress while really waiting tables. Mac liked her fine, especially since she did Mac’s nails and took her to the beach, but Dad wasn’t very nice to her and Mac doesn’t expect to see her again very soon. Dad’s real dad, on the other hand, is in prison, and Mac knows better than to mention him.

“We don’t have _biological_ family,” Dad says, “but your godfather lives there.”

This statement has enough shock value for Mac to actually look over at Dad, who is looking like he just ate something sour. (Of course, that could just be the Ripped Fuel.) “My godfather? I thought my godparents were the Garzas?”

“No,” Dad says, like she’s the crazy one. “Why would you think that?”

“Because I always stay with them when you’re deployed? Isn’t that what godparents are for?”

“I mean, I guess sort of,” Dad says. “But that’s not _all_ they’re for. You have an official godfather, too, from when you were baptized.”

This is the first Mac is hearing of her being baptized, but she decides to let that one slide in the interest of pursuing the more pressing matter of her godfather. “So who is my real godfather, then?”

“You know, your Uncle John. He sends you presents on your birthday and Christmas,” Dad says.

“You mean my fake uncle who sends me _stacks of books_ on my birthday and Christmas?” she says, flabbergasted.

“Yes, that fake uncle,” Dad says.

Mac just continues to stare at him.

“He’s not doing it to torture you, you know,” Dad says, eyes fixed firmly on the road ahead. “He likes books. He thinks he’s being nice.”

Mac doesn’t really know how to respond to a statement like that, so she just fishes through the tape box.

They stop again in New Mexico for dinner at another diner. There’s a sandy back lot behind the building and Dad lets Mac run around in it to ‘stretch her legs’ for a while as he watches anxiously. He also lets her order a hot dog, but no soda because then they will have to stop to pee more and also because Dad gets stressed about Mac getting cavities. Apparently when he was a kid he ate lots of sugar and didn’t brush and floss well and then when he became a Marine and got insurance he had to have lots of dental work done. He claims it was scarier than getting shot, which has also happened to Dad, but Mac thinks he is probably exaggerating to scare her into flossing well.

Some time after the diner Mac falls asleep in the truck, and when she wakes to Dad shaking her, it is pitch black outside and they are at another rest stop.

“Where are we?” Mac mumbles.

“Texas,” Dad says. “Come on, let’s go in quick.” Dad makes her floss and brush her teeth in the bathroom, and when they go back out to the truck he takes her sleeping bag out of the back so she can unzip it and use it like a blanket. She falls back asleep quickly.


	2. Part I: Chapter Two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dad and Mac arrive in St. Louis.

The next day is really sucky, because Dad’s been driving all night and he has a headache from all the caffeine, so he doesn’t even want to listen to music. Mac spends most of the time looking out at Oklahoma and Missouri in sullen silence interrupted only by rest stops at which she buys more sad, no-cheese sandwiches. There isn’t even anything interesting to see, because they’re on the interstate the whole way, so it’s just lanes and lanes of asphalt and cars with Oklahoma and Missouri plates. Mac knows Dad’s funny friend -- Mr. Person, who visits Oceanside sometimes -- lives in Kansas City, but Dad doesn’t pull off there. As they whip by green exit signs, Mac tries to imagine what it will be like in St. Louis, but she doesn’t know anything about it except that it is in a place called The Midwest that she’s heard grown-ups talk about but has never been to.

They hit a lot of traffic on the outskirts of St. Louis because it’s the beginning of rush hour, and then Dad gets lost and loses his temper trying to find the exact address, which probably wouldn’t happen if he had an iPhone instead of a nine-year-old reading a fold-out paper map of a city she’s never been to, but this doesn’t seem like a good time for Mac to tell Dad ‘I told you so.’ She doesn’t really mind, anyway; it gives her a chance to see all the streets of neat, pretty houses. At Camp Pendleton, all of the houses in her neighborhood looked sort of boring and identical to each other, like little copy-and-pastes, but here each house is a bit different, like it has its own personality. 

At last they pull up on the street in front of a particularly squat little house that could really use some new paint, and the number on the front matches the one Dad said they were looking for. Mac loses no time in pulling the metal tab that unlocks the door and spilling out of the truck and onto the street. 

The first thing she notices is the surprising cold, which zings along the bare parts of her legs where her leggings don’t reach. It is way colder here than in California. 

The next thing she notices is the man at the entrance of the house. He is shorter than Dad, but very strong-looking, with dark brown hair and a neat, dark brown beard. He’s wearing a shirt and tie, but with blue jeans, and he’s trying to get through the glass front door without letting out the three dogs that are currently barking their heads off inside the house. After loudly telling them “No!” and “Stay!” several times and snapping at them with his fingers, they finally retreat about an inch back from the door, though they look ready to pounce at the first opportunity. The man -- Mac’s alleged godfather, she supposes -- crosses the grass to the sidewalk, where Dad has also emerged from the truck.

“Q-tip!” the bearded man yells. This is what all of Dad’s oldest friends call him, even though his name is really Evan. Mac thinks it’s because of the rapper called Q-tip.

“Yo, Christeson!” Dad calls back. 

The man keeps walking towards Dad; for a moment, Mac expects them to give each other a big hug, but then Dad just sort of hits him on the shoulder instead, and the man turns towards Mac. “Is this a little Q-tip I see?” he says. 

Mac isn’t usually a shy kid, but she feels a sudden urge to hide her face in Dad’s stomach. She goes with the urge. 

“Mac, come on,” Dad says. “Say hi to John.”

“Hi, John,” Mac says into Dad’s stomach.

She can hear the man -- John -- laugh behind her head. “It’s okay,” he says. “I don’t mind. But you should probably come meet the dogs, or they’re going to keep barking like that and my neighbors will murder me. I’m already on their shit list for giving out candy with nuts last Halloween.”

“Christeson. No swearing,” Dad says, his hand now tangled in Mac’s hair.

“Oh, shit, sorry,” John says. 

At this, Mac giggles and looks up. Dad is giving John a look that Mac knows terrifies E-2’s and E-3’s, but John doesn’t seem intimidated in the slightest. “That’s going to take some getting used to. Cops swear almost as much as Marines, and Sarah’s kid isn’t talking yet, so.” Mac makes an inference from context clues -- Mrs. Nolan’s favorite thing ever -- and decides that John is probably a cop and Sarah is probably someone he knows very well.

“Yeah, alright,” Dad says, and John goes back up the steps to the porch to let out his dogs. 

“ _You_ still can’t swear,” Dad reminds her. 

“I _know,_ Dad,” Mac says, even though she’s absolutely planning to try swearing in front of John when Dad’s not there to see what happens.

As soon as they’re released from their imprisonment in the house, the dogs run across the yard to bark at Dad and Mac. Dad kneels down to greet them. One reddish brown one jumps up on Mac, leaning its paws on her shoulders, which is a little scary because she doesn’t know any dogs other than the Garzas’ really old German Shepherd, Lucky, and this dog looks way stronger and fiercer than that one.

“Pippi, DOWN!” John yells. Pippi slobbers on Mac’s fleecey jacket for another few moments before she grudgingly gets down. “Sorry,” John says, approaching the crowd of dogs. “I just adopted her a few months ago and she’s still kind of an assho -- I mean, her previous owners didn’t train her very well. That one --” he points to a dog who is a mix of brown and white and who is sniffling at Mac’s hip -- “is Rocky, and that one” -- he points to the weird blue-ish gray one who is licking all over Dad’s face -- “is Tupac.”

“I can’t believe he’s still alive!” Dad exclaims, scratching behind Tupac’s ear.

“Sure, pitbulls can live fifteen years. He’s not even eleven,” John says. 

“I remember, Christeson,” Dad says, kissing Tupac’s face. Tupac licks him back right on the mouth, which is kind of gross. 

“You know him?” Mac asks, holding out her hand for Rocky to lick.

“Of course he knows him,” John says. “Do I look like the kind of idiot who would name a dog Tupac? He used to be your dad’s.”

“Really?” Mac asks. Dad’s never mentioned having a dog before, though he likes playing with Lucky. “How come he lives with John now?”

Dad just shrugs and scratches Tupac some more, so John answers for him. “Well, a newborn baby and a pitbull puppy at the same time is kind of a big ask, particularly with a full time job.” It takes Mac a moment to realize she must be the newborn baby he’s talking about. She wonders if he remembers her from when she was a baby. He must, if he’s her godfather, but it seems weird, since she doesn’t remember him. “Come on, let’s go in the house -- you must be exhausted, Q-tip.”

Dad grabs their hiking packs and duffels from the truck and the dogs run around the tiny front lawn while he hauls them up to the porch. Now that Mac knows what to look for, she can see that Pippi is the only one actually barking. John grabs a pack and a duffel from Dad to help him through the door, so Mac is the last one in, holding the door open for the dogs, who follow them with distinct panting, nail scratching noises. 

The inside of the house is not what Mac expected, though she’s not precisely sure what she did expect. It’s all one big room with stairs leading up to the second floor, and along the far wall is a very shiny-looking, modern kitchen, but the front of the room is a mess. A couch, covered by a sheet, is pushed up against the wall sort of in the way of the entryway, the floor is covered by a dropcloth, and a huge amount of wood is leaning against the wall. There is a fireplace, but the mantel has been ripped out of the wall. A toolbox is open on the floor and a power saw is set up against the window. 

“Sorry about the mess,” John says. “You should have seen it when I moved in. I’ve been working on it in my off time for, like, a year, but, what do you know, ripping up old carpet and sanding and staining wood is strangely not as fun and easy as it looks on HGTV. When you said you were coming, I kind of got motivated to finally hang the kitchen cabinets, but the living room still needs some work.”

“Mac, don’t touch the saw,” Dad says.

“I wasn’t going to,” Mac says, even though she really, really wants to touch the saw.

“Mackenzie’s room is in good shape, though, don’t worry,” John says. Dad grabs the pack and duffel that belong to Mac and follows John up the stairs. Mac follows Dad and the dogs follow Mac, still panting. 

The second floor landing is narrow, with a bathroom straight ahead and one room on each side. John opens the closed door to the right and the three of them pile into the little room. The dogs try to follow, so John has to spend a moment out in the hall, reminding them to sit and stay and snapping over their heads a bunch. It gives Mac a minute to look around what is apparently _her_ room. There is a window that looks out the side of the house, and the walls are a pale pink, which Mac thinks is pretty cool; the walls at home were white because the Housing Office had all sorts of rules about putting things back exactly as they were on move-out day and Dad never wanted to deal with repainting if they got PCSed in a hurry. There is a desk, a dresser with a round mirror attached to it, and a bed along the window-side of the room. They’re all made out of the same shiny, old-looking wood, like they were bought to match, and the bed has a gray-and-white patterned quilt on it.

“Christeson, you didn’t have to buy furniture for her room,” Dad says sternly. “I coulda done that.”

John, having successfully convinced the dogs to stay, just shrugs. “I didn’t buy shi-- anything. This stuff was all in my parents’ basement from when they turned Sarah’s room into a guest room. They were thrilled when I cleared it out for them.”

“How are your parents?” Dad says, setting down Mac’s bags next to the dresser. Mac can kind of tell from the way Dad says it that he actually knows John’s parents -- it’s not one of those non-questions grown-ups ask just to be polite.

“Same as ever,” John says. “I think I managed to scare them into staying in Lebanon for the next few weeks, but you’re not going to be able to avoid them on Thanksgiving, so, you know, prepare some remarks about the last decade of your life and I’ll make sure to bring plenty of bee-- I mean, grown-up juice.”

“I know what _beer_ is; I’m almost ten!” Mac says indignantly. 

“Duly noted,” John says. Mac does not know what that means, and she does not have an iPhone to look it up. “I’d suggest you keep the door mostly closed up here for a few weeks, Mac, because the dogs used to sleep in here, so it’s going to take some time to re-train them not to come in.”

Mac knows that Dad is not going to like her sleeping with a closed door on a different floor from him, so she looks over to gage his reaction. She sees his jaw tighten for a moment, but all he says is, “Christeson, you psycho, did you buy a house just to give your dogs their own bedroom?”

“No,” John says, “I bought a house to give my dogs their own yard, obviously. Come on, I’ve got the pull-out set up for you in the basement.”

The two of them start down the stairs and the dogs eagerly follow. “Mac, you coming?” Dad calls from out of view. 

“I’m going to unpack,” she says, wondering if he’ll challenge her. She can her him hesitate on the stairs, but then his steps continue downward, leaving Mac alone in the pink room. 

Mac doesn’t think John would have painted the room pink for his dogs. He must have done it for her.

It doesn’t take Mac long to empty her folded clothes into the dresser drawers. They don’t take up much space. She puts her hairbrush, elastics, and hair clips on top of the dresser, in front of the big mirror. After some thought, she empties her seashell collection out of its shoebox and displays it there as well. On TV, teenagers always have mirrors like this over a dresser or a little desk in their rooms and they put on their makeup and jewelry there. Mac isn’t allowed to have makeup or pierce her ears until seventh grade, but this would be a very good dresser for those things. Mac spends some time wondering if she will still be here in seventh grade, but she gives up because she can’t really imagine being in seventh grade.

She suspects Dad can’t imagine her being in seventh grade, either; it’s probably why he said yes to her getting a phone and makeup and pierced ears then.

. . . . . . . . . . . . 

When Mac finally changes into some jeans to cover the cold parts of her legs and tears herself away from the pink room to go downstairs, John is alone in the kitchen, chopping things on the high table that sort of divides it from the rest of the open space. The dogs are sprawled out in various corners, and when Mac reaches the bottom of the stairs Pippi barks at her, but she stops when John tells her ‘no.’ Mac hauls herself up onto a stool to watch him, swinging her legs.

“Where’s my dad?” she asks.

“Sleeping in the basement,” John says. “I told him it was a bad idea because he’s been driving for twenty-four hours so he probably won’t wake up for dinner, but whatever.”

“I can wake him up,” Mac says. She doesn’t say that Dad never sleeps for very long at a time, even when he’s super tired; John will figure that out soon enough, if they stay here. “What are you making?” she asks. 

“Turkey burgers and sweet potato fries. Kids like those things, right? I mean, do you like those things?”

“Sure, we eat those all the time,” Mac says, watching John squish some pink meat around in a bowl with his hands. “But they look different when Dad makes them.”

“How do they look when your dad makes them?” John says, squishing some more. 

“They come out of a box in the freezer.”

For some reason, this makes John laugh. “I hope I can compete with that. You want to help me?”

“Sure,” she says. Mac can’t decide if the squishing looks really gross or really fun, but that’s not what John asks her to do, anyway. 

John reaches into a drawer behind him for a peeler and hands her a whole sweet potato. “Peel,” he instructs. “Put the peelings on that,” he adds, sliding a cutting board underneath her arms. 

Mac never really cooks with Dad (and Dad doesn’t cook anything elaborate or from scratch), so she hasn’t actually peeled anything before, but the peeler is pretty idiot-proof and she gets the hang of it quickly. “You used to be a Marine with my dad,” she says; it’s not a question.

“Sure was,” John says. He’s finished squishing and is now shaping the meat-mush into round patties on a plate.

“All of his really old Marine Corps friends call him Q-tip,” Mac says. “Is it because of the rapper?”

John laughs again. He seems like a very laugh-y sort of man, which is unexpected because his face looks very serious when he is not laughing. “He _wishes_ it were because of the rapper. It’s _really_ because his face and hair are so white that he looks like a Q-tip.”

Mac snorts. “We have the same hair,” she says.

John pretends to study her hair really closely, even though it’s obvious she’s right. “Nah, I think your hair is prettier,” he says.

“That’s just because it’s longer,” Mac explains. Then, “Did you invade Iraq with my dad?”

John takes a while to answer that question, paying more attention to a particular turkey patty than he probably really needs to.

“I did, actually,” he finally says. “Did your dad tell you that?”

Mac is on her last potato. “No,” she says. “He never talks about deployments. But I can tell you must have known him when he was really young because you don’t act like he outranks you even though he does.”

John abandons the turkey mush to look at her face. “You’re a smart little cookie, aren’t you?” he says.

“Not really,” Mac says. “I hate reading.” 

John is still looking at her like he’s thinking something serious, but whatever it is, he doesn’t say it out loud. Instead he says, “Boy, have I been getting you the wrong Christmas presents.”

It is definitely rude of Mac to admit this, but she says, “Yep.”

“Do you want to learn how to chop things with a giant knife?” 

Mac really, really does. John teaches her how to bend her fingers so she won’t chop them off and to use her knuckles to guide the blade. While she chops her sweet potatoes into french fry-sized sticks, he makes some sort of salad. When the fries are in the oven, John goes outside to start the barbeque, and the dogs and Mac follow. The sun has set, and it’s now even colder out. She’s glad she’s wearing jeans, but she wishes she had a warmer jacket. 

“I thought grills were a warm weather thing,” she says. 

“It’s still working in the cold, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Alright then. I refuse to cook meat indoors, unless it’s literally below freezing.”

“I’m freezing,” Mac says.

“No, you aren’t,” John says. “Do you know what temperature water freezes at?”

“No,” Mac says.

“Thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit. Remember that; you’ll probably need it for science. Do you know how cold it is right now?

“No.”

John reaches into the back pocket of his jeans and pulls out an iPhone. He quickly taps in a code with his thumb and passes it over. “Check the weather app,” he says.

Delighted, Mac taps the little cloud icon and reads the display. “Forty-eight degrees,” she says.

“See? We’re sixteen degrees over. Totally acceptable for grilling.” John is still messing with the lit coals, and Mac seizes the moment to follow an illicit impulse; she hits the little silver button on the side of the phone that blacks out the screen and then the home button at the bottom. The phone asks for a four-digit passcode. Mac types in 0-3-2-0. The screen slides into a grid of app icons. _Bingo._ March 20th, 2003: the date of the Iraq invasion. Dad uses it as a lock combination all the time. Apparently so does John.

“I think this is almost ready. Go get me the plate of burgers, please,” John says. Mac jumps, passes him the phone, and goes back inside. 

She’s about to carry the plate back out to John, but she stops in front of the fridge, which is next to the back door. John has a lot of stuff on his fridge -- a notepad with some reminders and a grocery list, invitations to two weddings (both in the spring), a magnetic bottle opener, a row of magnetic spice jars along the top, souvenir magnets from a bunch of national parks, and lots and lots of pictures. There’s one of John with a group of people in matching t-shirts, one of them holding a football -- probably some sort of team. There’s one of John in a tie and jacket with some other people at a restaurant. One of John and some other people wearing sunglasses and hiking gear on the peak of a mountain. One of John in a graduation gown in front of an old-looking building. Then there’s one she’s seen before at her house, of a group of Marines in front of a statue in Iraq; she finds Dad easily, but it’s only now that she realizes that the man next to him is John. He and Dad have their arms around each other. John doesn’t have a beard. They both look very young. 

The photo that catches her eye even more than these, though, is of John with a pretty woman with dark hair holding a baby. They’re both beaming down at the baby, who is red and yawning. Mac wonders if it’s an ex-wife or just an ex-girlfriend. She wonders how often John sees the baby. If it’s even a baby anymore. He has a beard in the picture, but who knows how long he’s had that? It could be quite an old picture -- there’s just no way to tell. 

“Mac?” John calls from outside.

Mac brings him the burgers.

. . . . . . . . . . . . 

True to Mac’s prediction, Dad does wake up for dinner, and he wakes up hungry.

As Dad shovels food into his mouth, John says, “You’re going to choke, Q-tip.” A moment later he says, “Ow, don’t kick me! Think of the example you’re setting for the child!”

“I’ve basically been eating beef jerky and Ripped Fuel for the last twenty-four hours,” Dad says once he’s swallowed his enormous bite. 

“You’re disgusting,” John says. “And you’re not twenty anymore; you really shouldn’t be doing that shi-- nonsense. Ow.”

“John, why is this lettuce so weird?” Mac asks. Dad said she had to eat her salad before the fries even though she made the fries all by herself.

“Because it’s not lettuce; it’s _kale_.” Dad says ‘kale’ with the kind of contempt he usually employs on words like ‘reservists’ and ‘East Coast Liberals.’ “I leave you alone for ten minutes, Christeson, and you turn into a bearded, kale-eating, DIY home-improvement hipster. For shame.”

“First of all, you didn’t leave me alone for ten minutes: you left me alone for ten years,” John says. “And second of all, it could be worse. I could have grown the kale myself. In a community garden. I bet you’d love that.”

Dad makes a face. Mac isn’t sure what’s wrong with community gardens; they had one at her school in California. The kale is still weird, but there are also apples in the salad -- she may have to rethink them as a snack-only fruit -- and whatever dressing John put on it is better than the one from the bottle that Dad uses, so overall she thinks it’s a trade up.

“I should have known college would turn you into a tree-hugging, bisexual communist,” Dad says. Despite his disparaging remarks against kale, he’s inhaling his salad now that he’s finished two turkey burgers.

“Excuse you,” John says, “it’s been at least a week since I’ve hugged a tree. College did not make me bisexual; I’ve always been bisexual, and you already knew that.” Dad chokes on his kale, but John ignores him and continues talking. “And since I know that in your tragic, non-college-educated mind, you’ve managed to conflate the Democratic Party with an extremely sketchy concept of what ‘communism’ is, allow me to inform you that I am a fiscally conservative, socially progressive independent voter.”

Dad -- who is now very red in the face and washing down the kale he choked on with a long, long sip of beer -- seems more shocked about the bisexual thing, but Mac already knows what that is from Diversity Day at school. “What’s a fiscally conservative, socially progressive independent voter?” she asks.

John chews and swallows his bite of burger before answering. “An independent voter is someone who doesn’t officially belong to either of the two political parties -- do you know what those are?”

“Republican and Democrat,” Mac says. “I’m not _that_ dumb.”

“You’re not dumb, period,” Dad says, still sounding hoarse.

“Someone who’s fiscally conservative wants the government to spend less money, and someone who’s socially progressive wants the government to protect everyone’s rights, even if they’re different from the majority, and also help people who need help.”

“Sounds good to me,” Mac says.

“Sounds _idealistic_ is how it sounds,” Dad says.

“It _is_ sort of an oversimplification,” John says. “But the point is, when you vote for someone, you need to look at where they stand on all of the issues and decide which issues are most important to you, instead of just voting Democrat or Republican because you’ve always done it.”

“I’m going to be a fiscally conservative, socially progressive independent voter,” Mac says.

Dad points his fork at John, which is bad manners. “We have been here _five minutes,_ and you’ve turned my daughter into a communist,” he says.

“We’ve been here for more than three hours,” Mac says.

“I’m going to buy you a copy of _The Communist Manifesto_ so you can learn what communism actually is,” John says.

. . . . . . . . . . . . 

There is a _lot_ of stuff in the basement. There’s the usual stuff you would expect, like a washer and dryer and a shelf with storage. But there’s also a bunch of other stuff: half the concrete floor is covered with a sort of gym mat, and there’s some weights over there. The other half is covered with a bunch of mismatched rugs, and over there there’s a couch that Dad is obviously sleeping on and a pool table with a ping-pong top attachment. Rammed into a back corner is a desk with papers and a laptop, which apparently used to be in Mac’s room along with the dog beds.

After dinner, Mac and Dad play a few rounds of ping pong while John sends work emails. Then Dad sends Mac upstairs to do her math workbook and twenty minutes of nonfiction reading and twenty minutes of fiction reading (which he has unfortunately not forgotten about) while he and John drink another beer and play pool and probably argue about communism and John being bisexual.

“You gonna be okay up here, Skipper?” Dad asks when he comes up to tuck her in. 

The room is a different shape than her room in Oceanside, and it has different shadows, and the bed makes soft, creaky wooden noises when she turns over too vigorously, which she isn’t used to -- her old bed had a metal frame. But she also doesn’t want Dad to do something crazy like sleep in his sleeping bag on her floor, which he would absolutely do. So she says, “I’ll get used to it, Dad.”

“You know where I am if you need me, right?”

“Yeah,” she says.

“Remember, you have to walk through the kitchen to get to the basement, and that’s where the dogs are, but John put that metal gate thing up, so even if they bark they can’t jump on you.”

“I know.”

Dad leans over and smooths her hair and kisses her forehead. “I’ve got your six, kiddo,” he says.

“I’ve got your six, Dad,” she replies.

She falls asleep so fast that she doesn’t even remember Dad closing over the door.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Coincidentally, this is Daniel Fox, the actor who played Christeson, with a beard: here. Yeah, you’re welcome.


	3. Part I: Chapter Three

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dad enrolls Mac in school; John buys another book.

Dad checks on her once in the middle of the night -- or once that she knows of. She half-wakes to him telling her to go back to sleep. Later, she wakes all the way, and it’s still dark out. After a few minutes’ deliberation, she creeps out of bed. The floor is cold against her feet and the wooden boards creak when she walks; their Camp Pendleton house was all silent carpet and tile. In the hallway, she can see that John’s door is cracked and his room is dark, but she can’t hear any sounds except heavy breathing, not even really snoring.

Downstairs in the kitchen, the dogs all look up when she walks by, but none of them bark -- not even Pippi. The basement stairs feel different than the regular stairs, because they’re just unfinished planks. It’s darker down there, too, because there are only two small, high windows in the back, and not much light is getting through. It’s enough, though, for her to see that Dad has sweated through his t-shirt and his sheets and he’s tossing and turning on the pull-out couch. She considers waking him up by tugging his ankle, but then he would know that she’s down here and he might think it was because _she_ was scared, which she wasn’t. 

As she turns around on the bottom step to climb back up, a shaft of light reflects off something on the edge of John’s desk, which is right next to the couch, and she sees that it’s Dad’s sidearm. He must have gone back to the truck after putting her to bed and taken it out of the locked glove compartment. She feels really cold all of a sudden, and not just in her bare feet. For a wild moment, she considers sneaking over to John’s desk and taking it away. But that might wake Dad up, and even if it didn’t wake him up, she’d be in _really big trouble_ for touching a loaded weapon, even if she was just moving it farther away from him. So in the end she just goes back upstairs to the pink room and back to bed. It’s a lot harder to get to sleep this time.

. . . . . . . . . . . . 

John does PT with them in the morning; it’s the first time Mac’s ever done PT with anyone other than Dad.

“Does she do this _every morning?_ ” John says when they’re doing planks on the front porch.

“It’s a body-weight exercise,” Dad says. “Her body weighs, like, twenty ounces.”

“It feels heavier than that,” Mac says, core muscles tense.

“Okay, down now,” Dad says, and all three of them collapse. 

“Can you _throw_ with that arm? Do you play baseball?” John says. “Do you want to _learn_ baseball? And join my partner’s Police Athletic League team? Immediately?”

“And up again,” Dad says.

“I’m a girl. Girls play softball,” Mac tells John. She tries to do it in her best ‘you’re stupid’ voice, but since she’s planking, she probably just sounds strained.

“You’re a _ringer_ is what you are,” John says.

Mac does not know what a ringer is but she _does_ know John’s iPhone passcode, so she can look it up later. 

John brings all three dogs on his run, which is weird at first, but he pretty quickly leaves Dad and Mac in the dust, so it doesn’t really matter. Mac hadn’t really thought about it before, but of course when Dad runs with her he’s going much slower than he can go. Maybe soon, like when she’s ten, Dad will start letting her run by herself, or at least turn off early. Their route takes them mostly through this enormous park near John’s house, which is way safer than running on roads. And even if Dad won’t let her run alone, John could teach her how to run with the dogs; surely nothing bad could happen to her with three pitbulls in tow, could it? Then Dad and John could run together and they could both go fast.

When they get back to the house, John is already in the one shower and the dogs are panting on the kitchen floor. Pippi appears to have forgotten them overnight, and she barks when Dad lets them in through the unlocked front door. Dad tells her ‘no’ very sternly and snaps; it takes longer than when John does it, but she listens eventually. Mac is no longer surprised that Tupac used to be Dad’s dog. Dad starts the coffee while Mac sits down on the floor to cuddle Pippi, who may be the worst of the dogs but is also indisputably the cutest. 

“You can have the next shower. You smell worse,” she says.

“Gee, thanks, Skipper,” Dad says sarcastically, but when the sound of water from upstairs shuts off, he grabs some clothes from the basement and heads up for his shower. 

John comes downstairs a few minutes later, once again wearing a shirt and tie with jeans. It must be how he dresses for work. Unlike yesterday, though, he has a gun holstered at his waist. Mac freezes momentarily when she sees it, and Pippi, under her arms, whines plaintively in response. 

“Shhh,” Mac says.

It’s really not a big deal. John is a cop. Cops have guns. He must have already put it away when she met him yesterday. 

John makes a beeline for the coffee maker and pours himself a large mug. The mug says ‘Swift. Silent. Deadly.’ on the front; Mac knows what that means. “Want eggs, Macaroni?” John says. 

“Sure,” Mac says, abandoning Pippi on the floor to climb onto a stool. Pippi is somewhat offended by this, and follows Mac over to the high table to sit on the floor and look up at her tragically, but unfortunately for her Mac is too tired to care overly much -- her limbs feel all noodley still from PT. 

John spends another moment sipping his coffee with the same nearly-religious focus that Uncle Rudy applies to yoga, and then he moves to the fridge and starts removing ingredients: a tomato, a jalapeño, half an onion, Tabasco, and a block of parmesan cheese.

“Hey!” she says suddenly. “That’s how my dad makes eggs!”

“Yeah?” says John. “Where do you think he learned it?”

Mac’s mind is officially blown, though, in retrospect, this makes perfect sense: Dad has no natural skill as a cook. “Except I don’t eat onions, and Dad uses the pre-grated cheese,” Mac says.

“Blasphemy!” John exclaims, but he puts the half onion away in the fridge before whisking eggs, egg whites, and Tabasco together in a bowl. 

Mac notes that he cracks eggs with just one hand, which looks super cool. Maybe if they stay in St. Louis for a while, John will teach her how to do that. “Can I chop things with the giant knife again?” she asks.

John lets her do the tomato while he does the jalapeño. He also lets her grate the cheese with a strange wand thing and scrape the spatula through the pan with his help as the eggs cook. By the time Dad comes downstairs, they have three plates of eggs and some toast. 

“Oh, good,” John says, putting down his coffee cup. “I have important shi-- _stuff_ for you, and I need to get out of here in about ten minutes.”

“Why do I remember swearing more than you?” Dad says, taking a bite of his eggs.

“Because you did swear more than me,” John says, shoveling a large forkful of eggs into his mouth. “Then you had a kid and stopped swearing, and I became a cop and carried on. Anyway, you’re going to need proof of residence to enroll her in school and probably to set up your benefits stuff through the VA, but you obviously don’t have any mail here, so I left you recent utility bills and signed letters -- one for the school and one for the VA -- but that’s my work number there if someone gives you a hard time.” John gestures at a sheaf of papers affixed to the fridge with a Glacier National Park magnet. 

“Thanks, man,” Dad says, starting in on his own eggs.

“But seriously, though, Q-tip -- call that school district number today. Like, before three. As a government employee, I can tell you that I have zero faith in those people being available over the weekend, and you want her to be able to start Monday, don’t you?”

Mac, of course, has been hoping for a significantly longer reprieve from school, but she doesn’t see a way around that now, and if she gives any sort of performance of disappointment and annoyance now, she’s just going to get stuck having yet another serious talk with Dad about how school often feels like the worst, but it’s really important for her future and he wishes he’d tried harder at it and been better at it and blah blah blah. Mac settles for scraping her fork across her now-empty plate so that it makes a really annoying noise. 

“Mac,” John says over the screech. “Come with me real quick. I need to show you how to feed the dogs.” John places his plate in the sink and gestures at the closet under the stairs. 

“Me?” Mac says, surprised.

“Yeah,” John says, squirting some dish soap onto his plate and the egg pan. “You need to be able to really control them, and, trust me, being their source of food is going to be the fastest way.”

“Yeah, that’s smart,” Dad says. 

Mac makes her way over to the closet and opens it, and it’s clear that the dogs know exactly what is up, because they all get up and follow her over, crowding into her space.

“Okay, so, first step: don’t let them get away with that. That’s just rude. Tell them, ‘back,’ and do this with your hand.” John gestures. “You don’t have to be _loud,_ but you have to sound like you mean it.”

Mac tries and the dogs continue to crowd her.

“Pretend you’re their C.O.,” Dad says around a mouthful of toast.

Mac closes her eyes for a moment and imagines that she’s Dad and she’s talking to an eighteen-year-old boot-drop. Then she tries again, and the dogs back off a few inches. 

“Good job, Skipper,” Dad says. 

“Okay, now make them sit and stay before you open the closet. If it’s just one who’s not listening, call them out by name, and you can snap over their head if it helps.”

It takes another thirty seconds at least to get them all sitting and staying. Unsurprisingly, Tupac is instantly compliant; Pippi is the worst. When she finally opens the closet door, though, all three of them maintain their positions.

“See the measuring cup next to the food?” John asks. “It’s got a piece of tape marking the right amount for the three of them.”

The feed container is heavy, but Mac is really strong for a nine-year-old, so it’s not really a problem. She measures out the feed. “Where are their bowls?” she asks, belatedly realizing that she’s seen their water bowl but no food bowls.

“I just feed them from the floor,” John says. “Trust me, they won’t leave anything.”

“Heathen,” Dad says.

“Remind them to stay when you put the food down. And then when you want them to eat, do this with your hand.” John gestures.

Mac doesn’t really believe the dogs are going to stay put once she’s spread out their kibble on the floor in front of her, but, miraculously, they do, and they wait to pounce on it until Mac gives them the go-ahead. Extricating herself from the pack to get back to her stool is slightly harder.

“Keys,” John says to Dad, throwing him a set. “Those are actually the ones I leave with my parents in case of emergencies, so you should get a copy cut and then we can give them back at Thanksgiving.”

Dad makes a face at the mention of Thanksgiving. 

“Yeah, I hear you,” John says, even though Dad didn’t actually say anything. “I have to get out of here, though. When you leave, just make sure you put the dogs back in the kitchen with the gate up so they can’t, like, jump on the saw or eat your hiking boots or something. I’ll see you guys tonight.” John departs with a quick wave, grabbing his jacket as he heads out the front door to an old-looking SUV-type car parked on the street. 

“Guess it’s back to just you and me today, Skipper,” Dad says. 

“Guess so,” Mac agrees. 

Mac spends the morning showering, playing with the desk in her room (which folds up and down), and drawing portraits of all the dogs with her art set. During this time, Dad does the rest of the dishes, unloads the truck, calls the school district and gets put on hold for a long time, and tries and fails multiple times to make copies of Mac’s immunization records on the crappy printer-copier in the basement before ultimately succeeding. Around ten, he announces that they have to go to the local school -- which is apparently called Mason Elementary -- and drop off important papers.

Mac is not thrilled by this development.

They hurry from the truck into the school because it’s even colder today than it was yesterday, but the school still makes an impression on Mac. It’s one of those really old, big red brick buildings, like a school in an old movie; her school in California was much more modern and had a bunch of connected buildings and outdoor lockers for the older kids under shaded overhangs. Inside, there are the usual colorful bulletin boards with student work and pictures of field trips, but it seems like the size of the hallways and rooms is too small for all the stuff that’s in there now; Mac feels trapped. Then, peeking through a little door-window into one of the classrooms, she realizes she’s even more screwed than she thought: the kids are wearing uniforms.

“Oh no!” she wails at Dad as they make their way to the main office. “Why do they have uniforms? It’s not a Catholic school!”

Dad clearly does not empathize with her distress. “It’s really not the end of the world, Mac.”

“It’s the end of _choices._ It’s the end of _not looking like a dork.”_

“I used to wear a uniform to work every day. Did I look like a dork?

“Yes,” Mac says meanly. “You did.”

In the office, Mac sits in a chair next to two boys about her age who are clearly waiting to have a talk with the principal. They keep throwing her looks; they can tell she’s new because she’s wearing civilian clothes. Dad has to argue a bit with the receptionist about the utility bill not being in his name; it sounds to Mac like she actually does call John at work to confirm that they really live in Hi-Pointe and are not just trying to sneak Mac into some dumb school with uniforms for the fun of it. Once the receptionist takes Mac’s immunization records and Dad fills out a bunch of paperwork, she hands him several pieces of paper: how to access the parent portal website, nutrition information, school supplies, uniform guidelines. “You can get uniforms at pretty much any store that sells kids’ clothes,” the desk lady tells Dad. “Old Navy, Target, whatever.”

“I can hardly wait,” Mac says sarcastically as she climbs back into the truck. 

Dad waits to start the car until she’s buckled in. “Look, Mackenzie,” he says, an immediate red flag: he never calls her by her full name. “I know leaving the Corps and moving more than halfway across the country has not been easy for you. But deciding you’re going to hate your new school before you’ve even started is guaranteed to make you even more miserable, I promise you.”

“Whatever,” Mac mumbles.

“And there’s going to be good things about living in St. Louis, too, I promise.”

“Like what? You don’t even know anything about St. Louis,” Mac argues as Dad pulls out of the school parking lot, leaving the giant red brick building behind. 

“Well, I was going to start with me not having to deploy anymore and getting to be home with you all the time, but in fact I _do_ know St. Louis. I used to come here all the time when I was younger.”

“With John.”

“Yeah.”

“If you guys were such good friends, how come I’ve never met him before now?”

Dad shrugs and keeps his eyes on the road. “He left the Corps.”

“So?” Mac presses. “There are phones. Internet. Planes.”

“We got in a fight before he left,” Dad says with a warning note in his voice.

Mac ignores the warning. “Like you got in a fight with grandma? And my mom?”

“Mackenzie, that’s enough,” Dad says.

“You get in a fight with everybody,” Mac mumbles. 

Dad doesn’t say anything for the rest of their drive through the city. First they stop at an outdoors gear store so Mac can get a real winter jacket and more warm layers and gloves. It’s pretty expensive. Dad pays with the yard sale cash from the glove compartment. Then they go to Target to get school supplies and uniforms: a bunch of white, light blue, and dark green polo shirts and some ugly khaki skirts and pants and one jumper. Dad tries to bribe her with some hair elastics that have bows that match the uniform colors and Mac does her best to be _just_ sullen enough to demonstrate her continued dislike of him but not sullen enough that he puts back the bows, which she actually does want. He also gets her some long pajamas and fluffy slippers, which she had no need for in California. At least that stuff is way cheaper than the jacket: the uniforms are all marked down because it’s October and school started here in August.

After that it’s time for lunch, and Dad takes her to a place with amazing barbeque; either he’s still trying to bribe her, or he’s trying to convince her that St. Louis is cool.

“Pretty good, huh?” he says when she’s covered about a quarter of her face with barbeque sauce.

“It’s okay,” Mac says. Her disinterest is somewhat undercut by the fact that she’s sucking on a rib bone.

“Oh come _on,”_ Dad says laughing. “You’ve never had barbeque this good in your entire life, you little punk.”

“St. Louis has better barbeque than California,” Mac allows. “But there is nothing else cool about it.”

“I think Nelly disagrees with you,” Dad says.

“What are you talking about?”

“Have you ever actually listened to the lyrics of _Country Grammar?”_ Dad says.

It takes a minute for Mac to get it. Then she starts singing, “Mmmmm you can find me in St. Louie, where the gun play ring all day, na na na!”

“Exactly,” Dad says.

“I didn’t realize he was from here. I guess that’s cool,” Mac says. “So, _two_ cool things.”

“I guess we’ll have to work on finding more,” Dad says. “John probably has some ideas, though I may need to screen them for kid-appropriateness.”

Mac wipes her face with the little wet cloth packet they gave her at the food counter before she speaks. “What did you guys fight about, anyway?”

Dad’s smile falls off his face so fast it’s like it was never there. “Grown-up stuff,” he says. “Go throw out your trash and put your tray back. We’ve got two more stops to make.”

The next stop turns out to be the VA, an immense building where Dad needs to talk to someone to sort out his benefits paperwork. It doesn’t seem to be the most efficiently-run place in the world, because Dad has to spend about ten minutes talking to the lady behind the front desk in the lobby before she can tell him what paperwork to fill out and which office to bring it to. 

While Dad is sorting that out with her, Mac wanders a few feet away. The lobby is huge, and there are loads of people waiting in the airport-like seats. From where she’s standing, Mac can see two guys in wheelchairs and one who seems to be missing his left arm below the elbow. She tries not to stare. 

There’s an older-looking man standing behind a table giving out pamphlets and what looks like free stuff. Mac figures he’s probably a vet, but he’s too old for Iraq or Afghanistan -- maybe he was in Vietnam. Mac approaches the table. There are a bunch of squishy toys there, the kind that Mrs. Kincaid, her Resource Room teacher at her old school, said she could use to stay focused in class as long as they stayed under the desk where no one could see. Mac picks one of them up. On the front, it says, ‘IT TAKES THE COURAGE AND STRENGTH OF A WARRIOR TO ASK FOR HELP.’

“That’s a stress ball,” the man says. “You can put it in your pocket, squeeze it if you have a little stress. And, if you turn it over there --” he gestures and Mac turns the ball around to see more writing on the other side. It says ‘Veterans Crisis Line,’ and there’s an 800 number underneath. “You see that number?” the man asks.

Mac nods.

“If you have a friend or a family member that’s in trouble that’s a vet, you just call that number and then press one, and someone will be able to help you,” he says. 

“Can I keep this?” Mac says.

“Absolutely, absolutely,” the man answers. 

Mac puts the squishy toy in the cavernous pocket of her new, green winter jacket. Then she picks up what looks like a red padlock in a plastic bag. It also says ‘Veterans Crisis Line’ and has the same 800 number. 

“That’s a gun lock,” the man says. “See that part, there? That goes through the barrel, and it locks. It keeps them from hurting somebody by accident, and it gives them a little extra time to think before they commit -- before they make the wrong choice.”

Mac nods.

“You got a family member that’s a vet that has a gun, honey?” the man says.

Mac nods again.

“Well, the most important thing is to make sure it’s always stored safely, unloaded, in a gun safe.”

“He’s not doing that,” Mac says, but really, really quietly. 

The man hears her, though. “Well, it’s maybe a good idea to have a trusted adult talk to him, or them.”

“Mac!” Dad calls from over by the desk; apparently the receptionist has finally figured out where he’s supposed to be going. “Let’s go!”

The man looks across the lobby at Dad waving for Mac to follow him. She wonders what he sees: his high-and-tight, the combat boots he’s wearing under his jeans, his desert-colored fleece pullover. Or maybe just something about the way he’s looking at her and at everyone else in the lobby. “You can keep that, too, honey,” the man says.

Mac shoves the gun lock into her other jacket pocket and follows Dad down three different hallways so he can talk to someone about insurance for dependents, which Mac is pretty sure means her. Apparently the VA covers Dad, but he has to buy her insurance on something called a marketplace. The office worker who is helping him says ‘Obamacare’ several times. Mac wonders if John thinks President Obama is fiscally conservative and socially progressive. She decides to ask him at dinner.

In the truck, Dad notices her squishing the squish toy. (He does not see the gun lock; Mac keeps that in her jacket pocket.) “Where’d you get that, Skipper?” he asks.

“The man in the lobby at the VA gave it to me,” Mac says. 

“Mac,” Dad says in his stern voice, “he wasn’t there to give out toys.”

“It’s not a toy,” Mac says. “It’s my new focus fidget for school. Like Mrs. Kincaid said.”

“That’s not what I meant,” Dad says, even though at that Learning Meeting with Mrs. Kincaid he’d said that the last thing Mac needed was toys in the classroom distracting her even more from reading. Mac’s a few letter levels below where she’s supposed to be. “I meant, he was there giving those things out to people in trouble who really need them.”

Mac doesn’t say that she’s pretty sure Dad is in trouble enough to qualify. “I _asked_ him,” she says. “He said I could keep it.”

Dad must decide to drop it, because he doesn’t say anything else until they pull into the parking lot of a grocery store. 

“What are we doing here?” Mac asks. 

“Buying groceries,” Dad says, locking the truck behind them. 

“Why, though?”

“Because John is letting us stay with him, so it’s nice to help out.”

“I don’t think John wants your help with groceries,” she says.

“Why not?”

“Because John cooks with, like, real ingredients. Not things that come in packets and boxes.”

This makes Dad laugh. “Oh ye of little faith,” he says. Mac has no idea what that means, but he then reaches into his jeans pocket and pulls out the grocery list that Mac saw on John’s fridge last night.

“You stole it?” she says, smiling.

“It was grateful to be liberated,” Dad says, and he pulls a cart free from the shopping cart train in front of the market. They spend a _lot_ more time in the produce aisle than usual, and they wind up having to ask a nice-looking middle aged woman shopper for help because neither of them can tell the difference between parsley and cilantro and the store isn’t very clear with its labeling. 

When they finally pull up in front of the house, there’s a moment when Mac half-expects to walk into their old house and be able to collapse on their squashy-but-sort-of-stained couch. Instead, she walks onto a drop cloth and almost trips over a pile of wood while the pitbulls bark at her from their pen in the kitchen. “This is going to get old really fast,” she says to Dad.

“Tell me about it,” Dad agrees. He’s carrying the heavier grocery bags. “Maybe I can get the master craftsman to share his grand design with me and do some of the work for him to hurry it along. Hey, why don’t you leave your bags on the table and take the dogs out back? I’mma put away the groceries and unload the truck.”

Mac thinks this sounds like an excellent division of labor. In fact, she’s starting to wonder how many boring chores she can possibly exchange for dog-related chores in the long run.

When John finally gets home from work, Mac is upstairs in her room drawing at her desk with her art set. She’s rearranged all of her clothes in the dresser so that her uniform shirts and skirts and pants are in their own drawer where they can’t infect her other clothes with their uncoolness. She’s also put the gun lock in her dresser -- in the regular clothes drawer, where Dad’s less likely to look on Monday -- but that’s a temporary solution at best. Dad always does her laundry and sometimes if she’s actually doing homework and not just messing around he puts it away for her without even mentioning it. He’ll find it if she keeps it there, and she honestly does not know what will happen if he does. Maybe he’ll be mad. Maybe he won’t be mad. Maybe he won’t seem mad, but he’ll be really upset when she’s not looking. That would probably be the worst.

That man at the VA who was probably in Vietnam said to have a trusted adult talk to her family member that’s a vet that’s in trouble, but Mac only has one trusted adult: Dad.

John knocks on her door, even though it’s open. “Can I come in?” he asks.

“Sure, whatever,” Mac says.

John wanders over to where she’s sitting at her desk, but he stops a distance away from her instead of leaning into her ‘personal hula hoop’ like Dad would. She’s working in her sketchbook, drawing a picture of the top of her dresser with the mirror and her seashells and hair things. 

“Damn, that is really good,” he says. “Not just good for a nine-year-old.”

“I’m almost ten,” she reminds him. “But thank you.”

“It’s weird how much you’re like Evan,” he says. “I mean, I _know_ how genes work. But I guess I’ve never really had occasion to see it firsthand before. It’s kind of freaky.”

Mac seriously does not know what to say to that, so she settles on: “I know my dad’s good at drawing, but he doesn’t do it very much.”

John waves his hand dismissively. “He’s better with spray paint, anyway. _Not a suggestion,_ by the way. Actually, you know what he’s really good at? Cool block letters. You should get him to write your name on those.” John gestures at the stack of pristine composition books and pocket folders they just bought at Target. At Mac’s old school, her teachers were really into three-ring binders; here it’s composition books and pocket folders. 

“Okay,” Mac agrees. 

“So, how was your day?” he asks. 

“Terrible,” Mac says. 

“Uh-oh,” John says, though he sounds more amused than concerned. “What happened?”

“The stupid school in your neighborhood has _uniforms.”_

“Damn,” John says. “That’s rough luck, kid. Want me to get the ACLU on the hook for you?”

Mac puts down her pencil and looks up at John. “What’s the ACLU?” she says.

“The American Civil Liberties Union?” John says. “It’s this non-profit group that helps protect citizens’ rights, like the right to free speech. They mostly do really good work, but, like, every other year they get involved in some ridiculous lawsuit trying to prove that some teenager wearing something absurd to their high school should be constitutionally protected under freedom of expression, so it’s pretty easy to make fun of them.”

“Do you think they could get me out of wearing my uniform?” Mac asks.

“Probably, but do you really want to be the only kid in school _not_ wearing it?” John says.

“I guess not,” Mac says glumly. 

“Hey, I’ve got something that might cheer you up,” John says, and from behind his back he withdraws a green plastic bag that clearly came from Barnes & Noble.

“You’re kidding, right?” Mac says.

“I’m _unstoppable,”_ John says. 

Mac makes a face, but she draws the book out of the bag and, to her very great surprise, it’s a children’s guide to training your own dog. “Oh,” she says, at a loss for something rude to say.

“Thought it might be helpful. I mean, more helpful for me than you, of course. The more you train that wildebeest Pippi, the less I have to.”

“Thanks,” Mac says genuinely, flipping quickly through the pages to see section headings, diagrams, and captioned photographs. Then, “Wait a minute -- this is nonfiction, right?”

“Yes, it is most definitely nonfiction,” John says. 

Mac bolts out of her desk chair and rushes to the top of the stairs. She can see from there that Dad is down in the living room looking at a really big diagram on a piece of paper, with the wood spread out around him; John must have shared the plans for the living room project. “I’m doing my twenty minutes of non-fiction reading starting now!” she announces. 

“Okay,” says Dad, who is understandably surprised she’s volunteering to get it out of the way early. 

John passes her on the stairs. “I’m taking the dogs out for about that long,” he says. “Do you want to be my sous-chef when I get back?”

“What’s a sous-chef?” Mac asks.

“They chop things for the chef,” John says.

“Sure, whatever,” Mac says.

It isn’t until later, when John comes back in with the dogs and she hears him from downstairs say, “Hey, Q-tip,” that she realizes he called him Evan when they were talking.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Although the father and daughter in the film take a very different turn than these characters, the scene in the VA between Mac and the man handing out gun locks borrows very heavily from a similar scene in _Leave No Trace_. Which I still recommend to everyone.


	4. Part I: Chapter Four

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mac eavesdrops.

Dad and Mac sleep in until 0800 the next day, but they still do PT with John, who does not have work this weekend. He beats them back to the house with the dogs again and when he comes downstairs to the kitchen he is not wearing a tie. He is instead wearing a t-shirt that says ‘Washington University’ on it. 

“Is that how you dress when you’re not being a cop?” Mac asks. Dad has already gone up to shower, so it’s just the two of them in the kitchen.

John shrugs; he is rummaging around in the bread box. “Guess so,” he says. “I think this loaf has gone stale.”

“We bought a new one yesterday,” Mac says. “We got one with lots of grains and seeds because Dad thought you would like that better than plain.”

John snorts out a little laugh. “Thanks, but that’s not what I meant. Do you want french toast?”

“Okay!” she says. Mac likes french toast, but she’s only ever had it at diners -- she didn’t realize it was a thing you could make at home. 

“Grab me the eggs and milk, will you?” John says, cutting into the stale bread with a knife that looks like a baby saw.

“I thought you said you were doing french toast.”

John turns around and looks at her with a beardy surprised face. “Do you not know that there are eggs in french toast?”

Mac shrugs, but she goes over to the fridge to get the eggs. “This is good,” she says. “If there are eggs, Dad can’t say it’s all sugar and no protein.”

“Uhh, maybe get the turkey bacon out, too,” John says. “There’s not that much protein.”

It turns out that John makes french toast by scrambling eggs in a shallow dish with a bunch of cookie ingredients like cinnamon and sugar and also a bit of something called vanilla in a tiny jar that smells like they stuffed all the vanilla ice cream in the world inside it. Then he dips the bread into the eggs.

“That looks like a really gross idea,” Mac points out.

“I _do_ sort of wonder about the first person who thought of it,” John says.

“Was it really someone French?” Mac asks.

“No clue,” John says, turning on the stove. “Ask Google.” He unlocks his phone again and hands it to Mac. 

Mac wonders if John is going to keep doing that, and she decides to stick to just looking up what he told her to so he won’t have any reason to suspect her of snooping, which she is definitely planning on doing at some point. “It says it’s been around since Ancient Rome,” she tells him. “But then some American guy whose last name was French started calling it French toast.”

“Huh. I guess we learn something new every day,” John says.

“Can you teach me to crack eggs with one hand?” Mac asks.

“Sure,” John says. “But I’m not going to let you go through a whole carton trying.”

“Can I try with one?”

John hums to himself in thought. “Tell you what. Go downstairs to the basement and get two of the ping pong balls.”

Mac gives him a look that she hopes communicates how crazy this sounds, but John seems undeterred, so she goes downstairs for the ping pong balls. When she’s down there, she checks the desk to the side of the couch for Dad’s firearm, but either he didn’t sleep with it last night, or he’s already stowed it somewhere for the day. Probably the latter.

Back upstairs, John shows her how to hold both of the ping pong balls in one hand. Then he slides a nickel in between them and makes her practice dropping it without dropping the ping pong balls. “Tomorrow you can try it on a real egg,” he says, and turns back to the stove.

“Is that what we’re eating?” Dad says, coming down the stairs when John is flipping a piece of french toast in the pan.

“There’s turkey bacon in the oven,” Mac says hurriedly. 

“Do you want a piece?” John asks, flipping Mac’s onto a plate. “I only have real maple syrup, not the whiskey tango corn syrup kind that you like.”

Mac laughs.

“Dawg, she knows what that means,” Dad says. 

“She _does?”_ John says.

“I know the whole military phonetic alphabet,” Mac says. “And how to use a radio.”

“You didn’t get her a sniper rifle for her fifth birthday, did you?” John says.

Dad gives John a look. 

“I’m a very good visual judge of distances, though,” Mac says.

“Of course you are. Do you want syrup, baby Rambo?”

Mac nods and takes the container from John, and John goes back to the stovetop to make more French toast. Dad needs to get by him to grab a bowl from the cabinet for his own normal eggs and normal toast, and when he does his chest brushes against John’s back. “Sorry, man,” Dad says, even though there’s no way that hurt. 

“It’s fine,” John says. 

By the time John and Dad sit down with their food, Mac has already eaten two pieces of french toast that John made her and she is sticking raspberries on the tops of all of her fingers so that they look like little hats. Dad is giving her a look like he’s trying to decide whether to tell her to stop playing with her food or just be glad she’s eating the one healthy part of her breakfast. John looks like he’s trying not to laugh.

“So, what do you guys want to do today?” John says.

“I don’t want to cramp your style, man,” Dad says. “You should do whatever you usually do on a weekend.”

John shrugs. “My softball league plays Sunday afternoons in Forest Park, and then we usually go out for beers afterwards. Saturdays I sometimes drive somewhere for a hike, but I didn’t plan anything for today, because I knew you guys were coming.”

Dad grunts into his food. “I was gonna start on them shelves,” he says. “Kinda want the saw out of the main room before she gets too curious.”

“Hey!” Mac says, sucking a raspberry off her left pinky finger.

“Sure,” John says. “We can be actually productive if you want.”

“Can I help?” Mac says.

“Sure,” John says, “but I suspect you’re going to get bored pretty fast. If you’re done with that --” John nods at her fingers, which are now raspberry free “--why don’t you go feed the dogs.”

Mac makes the dogs sit and stay again before she opens the stair closet with their food. When she’s pouring it out into the measuring container, though, she gets a brilliant idea: John seems serious about having only Mac feed the dogs until they get used to obeying her, which means no one else is looking in the big feed bag. It’s the perfect place to hide the gun lock from the man at the VA.

Dad sends her up to take a shower and wash her hair (“all of it, not just one part”) and by the time she comes back down with a brush, John has banished the dogs to the backyard and some Ikea boxes have materialized in the construction zone, presumably from the basement. Mac is wearing her biggest fleece with huge pockets, and she has the gun lock hidden inside one of them. There is no actual wall between the kitchen area and living room area, so there’s no way she can open the stair closet without Dad and John seeing, but she’s betting that once they get going on the construction she can probably get in there without them _noticing._ And if they ask what she’s doing in there, she can just pretend she was looking for chocolate or soda or something.

“Dad, it’s your mortal enemy,” she says, handing him the wet hair hairbrush and nodding at the boxes. Dad gets to work combing out her hair.

“Q-tip, if you’re defeated by the Ikea portion of this project, it is going to be a seriously miserable day for everyone,” John says. He puts the plastic bag of screws in Mac’s hand -- the one not holding her hair elastics. Mac was hoping that she would help in a more interesting way than this, but she doesn’t really know John well enough to complain about it. Maybe he’ll let her do the screws when he sees how bad Dad is at Ikea.

“I thought you were building the shelves into the wall,” Mac says.

“We are,” John says. “But I’m not about to build the base cabinets from scratch if I don’t have to.”

“Ponytail or braid?” Dad asks.

“Braid.”

“One or two?”

“One.”

Dad grabs an elastic from one of Mac’s hands at the same time John grabs a screw from the other, which makes Mac giggle.

“When did you become a hairstylist, Q-tip?” John says. He’s putting in the screws with a power tool instead of the little metal twisty thing that comes in the Ikea box. It makes a very satisfying whirring noise. Mac’s fingers itch to play with it.

“Learned on Youtube,” Dad says as he finishes off Mac’s braid. 

“He ever give you corn rows, Mac?” John asks.

“No,” Mac says. “I think I have the wrong kind of hair for that.” She’s only ever seen cornrows on Black kids. 

Dad is giving John another look like he’s sucking on one of those Atomic Warhead candies. Mac feels like she’s missing something.

“Get a move on, then,” John says. “We’ve got three of these things to assemble.”

Mac mostly winds up passing pieces of cabinet to Dad and John while they work (John is much better at describing the pieces than Dad), but John does eventually let her use the powertool on some screws. They have to measure really carefully when they place the cabinets against the wall, and John doesn’t seem to trust her to use a measuring tape correctly. 

“We’re leaving space between those two cabinets,” John says, brandishing a measuring tape and gesturing for Dad to push his over, “so I can build in a desk between them. That way we can get rid of that one in the basement, and you’ll have some more space down there.” Mac remembers the desk next to Dad’s sofa bed; when she checked on him late last night, he’d put his gun there again. 

When John gets out his nail gun -- the _coolest thing Mac has ever seen_ \-- to anchor the cabinets and raise the two boards on either side of the fireplace, Mac can see Dad start to grind his teeth. (Dad grinds his teeth when he gets stressed; it’s another reason he has so many dentist problems.) “Skipper, why don’t you go outside and play with the dogs?” he suggests.

Mac is about to object because she really wants to get her hands on that nail gun, but then she realizes this is the perfect opportunity to stash the gun lock. “Okay,” she says. “John, can I get some dog treats so I can start training Pippi like my book says?”

“Sure,” John says, over the super-loud staple-y noise of the nail gun. “But make sure you break the treats into little pieces so you can give her more rewards without feeding her too much. See if you can get her to stop fu-- to stop barking while you’re at it.”

Mac walks all the way into the stair closet so Dad can’t see her put the gun lock into the feed bag. Then she breaks up the treats and sticks them in her pocket like John said and grabs a lead. She winds up spending more than half an hour in the yard with Pippi. She hasn’t gotten to the part of her nonfiction dog book about correcting barking yet, but she does get Pippi to sit and stay more reliably. Rocky seems bored by the proceedings, but Tupac is jealous that Pippi is getting more attention, and he keeps sticking his nose into the side of her stomach, which is sort of annoying. She wonders if this is what it feels like when she does the same to Dad. 

Eventually she gets bored and opens the back door. “Can I come try the nail gun?” she calls across the room.

“No!” Dad and John say at the exact same time. 

Mac rolls her eyes. “Can I bring Pippi up to my room to play with me, then?”

“Fine,” John says. “But make sure you put up the child gate at the top of the stairs so she can’t get down here.”

Mac has to hold onto Pippi’s collar really tightly to make sure she heads right for the stairs and not the construction zone.

“Man, she can’t jump over a child gate?” Dad says.

“I mean, I’ve absolutely seen her jump _higher_ than the top of a child gate,” John says. “But luckily she’s too stupid to realize that jumping over a gate is a possibility. She’s not the brightest of the dogs.”

“Tupac is the brightest,” Dad says confidently.

“He’s probably the smartest, yeah,” John says. “But he’s also the neediest. You’ll see what I mean when we put the couch back. Whenever I sit down, he comes and literally lies down on top of my feet. I think he has abandonment issues.”

Dad grunts and doesn’t say anything, but John stops with the nail gun. 

“Q-tip, I was kidding. The dog is fine,” he says. 

Mac sets up the gate at the top of the stairs and brings Pippi into her room. Of course, Mac doesn’t really have any toys in St. Louis, so she just draws in her sketchbook for a while on the rug, sort of leaning back against Pippi who is lying behind her and panting. After a little while, though, Mac discovers a fringe benefit to living with not one but two grown-ups -- they talk to each other, and now that Mac is out of sight with her door mostly closed, they seem to think she can’t hear them. She can hear them; the house is pretty small. Mostly what Mac hears is them telling each other to hold things and pass things and John swearing, but eventually John says, “Any idea what you want to do now that you’re out of the Corps?”

“Not really,” Dad says. “I gotta figure out what I’m even qualified for.”

“Probably more than you think,” John says. “Employers take military training seriously now; it’s not like it was for Vietnam vets. Plus, didn’t you do some college courses while you were in?”

“Got my Associates,” Dad says. 

“You could always finish college, learn about Marxism,” John says. 

Mac does not know what Marxism is, but Dad must because he says, “Funny, Christeson.”

“What about Tiffany?” John says, and Mac freezes, squeezing her colored pastel really tightly. Tiffany is Mac’s mom’s name.

“What about her?” Dad says.

“I mean, I know you got a divorce, like, forever ago -- Ray told me when it happened. But she wasn’t mad about you moving Mac halfway across the country?”

“Man, she ain’t even seen Mac since she was four,” Dad says. “I don’t even think I have her correct address. Haven’t heard from her in more than a year.” This isn’t exactly news to Mac, but she still wiggles around and gives Pippi a hug. Pippi licks her face, which suddenly seems much less gross.

“Shit,” John says. 

“You ain’t gonna say ‘I told you so?’” Dad says downstairs. 

“No, come on, man. I’m not that much of an asshole.”

Mac wonders what John told Dad about Mac’s mom and when he told him it. 

When Dad and John call her downstairs for lunch, the living room part of the downstairs looks really different. They’ve managed to nail a lot of wood to the wall, including a mantel and some shelves. Mac can see wires sticking out of a hole above the fireplace where they’re probably planning to hang a TV, and they cut holes in the backs of the base cabinets, too, where the electrical sockets are. 

“Wow, are you guys actually going to finish today?” she asks.

“Probably everything except the tile around the fireplace, but that’s going to be easier if we paint the whole thing first,” John says. “It would have taken me way longer without your dad.”

After lunch, they send Mac back up to her room to get her away from the nail gun. Mac is officially bored by this point, so Dad promises that if she does all of her reading for the day now, he will take her to a movie later. Mac is in face _so_ bored that she reads the rest of her dog training book, all the way to the end. Late in the afternoon, though, Dad and John call her back downstairs for what they say is ‘the fun part.’ They tape off the entire room and then spray the new bookshelves and mantel with a giant spray painter. It is actually pretty fun. John says, “Q-tip, this is more your specialty, huh?” and Dad punches John in the arm.

Of course, then the downstairs smells like paint, so John puts the dogs in his bedroom with the window open and they go out for dinner and for Mac’s bribery movie. There is a really cool, old-fashioned movie theater that they walk by in the neighborhood where John lives, but it only shows one movie at a time and the one it’s playing is rated-R, so Dad says no. John promises to take her back if they ever show something appropriate for kids. They go to a normal theater to see The Book of Life, which Mac likes, but John clearly thinks it’s stupid.

“That was actually a good kids’ movie, dawg,” Dad tells him. “Trust me, you’ll see they get much worse than that.”

“I can hardly wait,” John says sarcastically.


	5. Part I: Chapter Five

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mac conducts a reconnaissance mission.

On Monday Mac has to start her new school with all new kids in the red brick building, and she decides that the only way to survive this mission is to be the perfect Recon Marine: swift, silent, and deadly. She blends in with her surroundings in her ugly khaki skirts and polo shirts, observing her target. In this case, her target is Mason Elementary’s 4th Grade “Notre Dame” Class. She generates a great deal of useful intelligence in just two weeks.

They name classes after the teacher’s college at this school, which is weird and also stupid because like three teachers went to Missouri State and two of them had to pick other class names. 

Hallway Behavior is a really big deal. If your class is going anywhere outside its room, you need to stay in a single file silent line until you get there, even if “there” is the cafeteria for lunch. You need passes for the bathroom and the nurse. (There is really no point in going to the nurse, though, because all she has is band-aids and ice. She is not allowed to give out Motrin.)

The school just gives everyone free lunch, although you have to pay $0.45 if you want extra milk. A packed lunch would probably taste better than the school lunch, but that would not be blending in with her surroundings.

Everyone in 4-Notre Dame and 4-Washington is convinced that their teachers, Miss Williams and Mr. Jackson, are secretly in love. Mac is pretty sure that this is not the case, since the only evidence she has seen of this romance is that they are both attractive and probably in their twenties and they share a projector that Miss Williams got from Donors Choose but that Mr. Jackson is far better at working. Regardless, it is very fashionable among the girls to share any sightings of their interactions, so Mac dutifully reports it when she sees Mr. Jackson help Miss Williams carry a box of composition books to her car one afternoon.

The boys take up all the basketball hoops on the playground and spread out over the field for baseball during recess, so the girls mostly stand around playing hand-games, which is stupid because it’s cold in St. Louis and you have to take your gloves off to play hand-games. Mac learns three new ones. Also, they play Numbers slightly differently here, so she has to re-learn that one, which is harder than learning new ones.

Mac is no longer in the lowest reading group. She is in a middle reading group for levels P to Q. They are reading _Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing._ John is more excited about this than Mac is. He also downloads an app that lets him scan the barcode of any kids’ book and find out what reading level it is. This does not bode well for Mac’s Christmas presents. At least he gets her several books about pitbulls for her nonfiction reading. When Dad objects to John buying the books, John says that he is her godfather and he has established he is in charge of buying Mac books and Dad can be in charge of buying her “a pony... or, more likely, an AK.” Mac does not think Dad is going to buy her either a pony or an AK, but he does buy chairs and a TV for the living room, and he hooks up the TV himself. (He is better with electronics than he is with Ikea.) Mac thinks he’s trying to make up for the fact that John got all of the furniture for her pink room before they arrived, even though that furniture was free from his parents’ basement, like the living room couch and rug.

There are more Black kids than white kids at Mason, but there are no Mexicans and almost no Asians. This is very different than school at Camp Pendleton.

Mac also observes that it’s best to avoid Darius Lafayette whenever possible. Everyone in 4-Notre Dame thinks he is funny and most of the girls think he is cute, but he gets about six Negative Consequences a day, and anyone in his direct vicinity usually gets them with him. He is officially the kid that Miss Williams gives “important files” to “take to the office,” which are clearly just a note in a folder telling Mrs. Jones at the front desk that Darius needs to take a walk.

None of this useful intelligence is what she shares with John, though, when he asks her about school two weeks later after he comes home very late from work and collapses onto the couch as soon as he puts his gun in the safe. Mac is pretty sure John’s gun safe combination is 0-3-2-0-2-0-0-3, and if Mac can guess it, Dad certainly can. She wishes John would choose something not Marines-related, like his birthday. But Dad probably knows John’s birthday, too, because they used to be really good friends before. 

“You guys get dinner?” John asks her. It turns out he was right about Tupac, who immediately nestles himself on top of John’s feet on the floor.

“Dad cooked pasta,” Mac says. “He is not as good at cooking as you are.”

“We’ve been here two weeks and already you’re spoiled,” Dad says, returning from the kitchen half of the room with an open beer for him and one for John. On the way, he almost trips over one of the boxes of books John dragged out of the basement after he and Dad finished building the living room shelves.

“Christeson, seriously, will you please let me put your goddamn books on the shelves,” he says as he catches his balance. He licks off a bit of beer that dribbled out onto his wrist.

“Not unless you want to sort them by first by genre and then by alphabetical order. I’ll get to it this weekend.”

“You one hundred percent will not,” Dad says, glaring. He hands John his beer anyway. 

“Thanks, man,” John says, pulling off his tie before taking it from him. Dad sits down in one of the chairs. Mac has noticed that he and John avoid sitting on the couch at the same time, even though the couch is big and all three of them could easily fit on there at once. 

Mac then makes the colossal mistake of announcing, “We learned about genres and alphabetical order in the library at school.”

“Really?” John says. “Maybe you should do the bookshelf. You could pick out any kids books you want to take up to your room. I think my old copies of Harry Potter are somewhere in there.”

“I don’t want any more books,” Mac says hurriedly.

“I think that’s a great idea,” Dad says, and Mac groans. “How about if you do a good job on the whole shelf, I’ll get you new sneakers.”

“Okay!” Mac agrees hastily before Dad can change his mind or set a price limit. Her old sneakers are very uncool at Mason Elementary. She needs new ones, like, _urgently._

John laughs and says, “Sorry, kiddo. At least you’re getting a bribe out of it. Other than alphabetization, how was school?”

Mac shrugs unenthusiastically. “We have to write a persuasive essay. That’s why we were in the stupid library.”

“Oh yeah? What about?”

Mac shrugs again. “We’re supposed to pick from this dumb list or come up with our own topic.”

“I’m sure the list isn’t dumb, Mac,” Dad says.

“It _is_ dumb,” Mac says. “And our nonfiction reading is supposed to be for our research, so now I can’t read my dog books.”

“Hmmm,” John says. “Did I ever tell you how I got Rocky?”

At the mention of his name, Rocky, who is lying on the rug, looks hopefully in John’s direction.

“A friend of mine originally got him from a pitbull rescue, but then he moved in with his fiance in Woodson Terrace, and they have a pitbull ban there, so he couldn’t take Rocky.”

“Why are pitbulls banned there?” Mac asks.

John shrugs. “A lot of people are scared of them and think they’re dangerous, even though it’s not true. Any dog that is poorly trained can be dangerous, and pitbulls are actually really easy to train and friendly. They just kind of have a bad reputation.”

“That’s so unfair!” Mac says.

“I know, kiddo,” John says. “In my experience, when people get scared, it makes them do mean stuff.”

There’s a clunking noise as Dad puts down his beer quite quickly on the floor. He’s giving John that just-ate-something-sour look again; this is becoming a pattern, and Mac’s inner-Recon Marine is curious, but John diverts her attention by saying, “Why don’t you look into the municipalities in St. Louis that ban pitbulls and write your essay persuading people to oppose the bans? Then you could keep reading your pitbull books and it would count for your project.”

“Okay!” Mac says cheerfully. Then she bounds over to the couch and squashes herself in next to John so there’s still room for Dad. “Are you watching _Annie_ on Netflix with us?” she asks.

John raises his eyebrows.

“Sorry, man,” Dad says. “When you texted you were going to be late I told her she could watch a movie if she finished her homework and got ready for bed real quick.”

“It’s fine,” John says. “I love musical theater.”

“Please tell me that’s your terrible idea of a joke,” Dad says.

“Come on, Q-tip, how long have you known me?”

“Well, you’ve changed your mind about an awful lot of things since then,” Dad mumbles as John grabs the remote and starts fiddling with it to switch it to the Roku and put on _Annie._

“Dad, come sit here so you can see the TV,” Mac says, patting the empty spot on the couch.

“I can see from here,” Dad says, even though the chair he’s in faces sideways, so he’ll have to turn his neck. Pippi, however, takes Mac’s seat-patting as an invitation to jump up on the couch.

“Pippi, down!” John and Mac say in perfect unison. 

Pippi retreats with a penitent squeal. Dad laughs at them. 

John watches the movie with Dad and Mac, and he declares Pepper to be his favorite of the orphans.

“You’re the only person who’s ever thought that,” Mac says. “She’s supposed to be the _mean_ one, John.”

“She’s the _funny_ one, you mean,” John says, and Dad laughs.

John definitely doesn’t pay attention to the whole thing, though -- after about twenty minutes someone called “Ashley” starts sending him text messages which Mac can see over his shoulder about how they are going to vanquish John in fantasy baseball and make him cry “tears of failure.” John responds with a lot of words that would cost him some serious Inappropriate Language Jar money if he said them aloud. 

(The Inappropriate Language Jar is a new development: Dad wanted to introduce a Swear Jar, and John agreed only on the condition that they expand the penalties to include “homophobic language and innuendos.” Mac is the only member of the household who has not paid the Jar a very large amount of money. She thinks that she should get to keep the money as a reward, but John says it is going to a charity, preferably one that Dad does not approve of.)

Mac starts fading quickly as soon as Annie moves into Mr. Warbucks’ house. She really wants to make it to the ‘Smile’ song, which is her favorite, but she doesn’t even stay awake until Mr. Warbucks and Grace take Annie to the movies. 

The next time she wakes up, it’s to the familiar tilting motion of Dad carrying her against his chest. 

“This is why you gotta make her brush her teeth and put on her pajamas before you let her watch anything,” Dad says. “Half the time she doesn’t make it to the end.” She can feel Dad turn the corner at the top of the stairs and walk into her room, but she doesn’t open her eyes as Dad puts her on her bed and pulls up the covers around her. 

“You’re really good at that,” John’s voice says from somewhere in the room.

“Carrying her up the stairs?” Dad says. “She weighs like twenty ounces.”

“You know that’s not what I meant.”

Dad makes a grunting noise, and then there’s the click of him turning off the light on top of Mac’s desk. He doesn’t respond to John, at least not aloud.

“I mean, I remember how worried you were before she was born, you know. About being a shitty father because your dad and stepdad were the worst. But you’re a really good father.”

At this, Mac risks cracking an eye, but all she sees are the backs of Dad’s and John’s heads as they walk out of her room; they accidentally brush up against each other in the narrow doorway, and Dad mumbles “sorry” and steps back to give John room.

Mac is too tired to think about it.


	6. Part I: Chapter Six

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mac gets in trouble, then makes a friend.

“Mackenzie?” Mrs. Carter, the counselor, is saying. “Do you want to talk about what happened?”

“I already wrote down what happened like Ms. Williams said,” Mac answers.

“I’d like to hear the story from you, though, if you don’t mind,” says Mrs. Carter.

Mac kicks her sneaker against the bottom of the couch she’s sitting on. There isn’t much of a story: Mac was minding her own business, using her focus fidget appropriately under the desk, helping her reading group find textual evidence for Fudge’s character traits for their Readers’ Notebooks. Darius, who is unfortunately also a P-to-Q reader, grabbed her focus fidget, said, “Cool!” and threw it across the room at the back of Jaequan’s head. Miss Williams said, “Darius, that’s your second strike today,” and took the focus fidget and put it in the box of confiscated items that you need your parent to pick up for you. It wasn’t even stupid Darius’s fidget, and he got it confiscated. Besides which, Mac has not yet memorized the 800 number on the side; she didn’t think she needed to, and she’s been busy memorizing John’s cell and work numbers, which Dad quizzes her on at random. So Mac socked him in the stomach. Mac can plank her entire body weight; her arms are very strong.

Mac crosses her arms and glares at Mrs. Carter.

“Why don’t we try something different,” Mrs. Carter says. “I hear you’re quite the artist.” Mrs. Carter takes out a sheet of printer paper and a box of colored pencils and puts them on the low table in front of the couch. “Why don’t you draw something for me? You could draw what happened today. Or you could just draw something you’re familiar with, like your house.”

Is this woman serious? Because this is not Mac’s first rodeo with counselors. She had to go every time Dad got deployed and also a year after the divorce, when Mom stopped coming for planned visits. When they ask you to draw a house, they’re convinced you’re going to draw a picture of all the secrets inside your head. Well, Mac is going to draw the happiest fucking picture of her house that this woman has ever seen.

She pulls out a pencil and gets to work: she puts them all standing in front of the front stoop of the house on the grass. In real life the paint is more gray than blue and the grass is more brown than green, but Mac makes them super bright and cheery. She puts herself in the middle of the picture because she’s been burned before by putting herself off in a corner. She puts Dad on one side -- carefully in civilian clothes and no combat boots because she’s not stupid -- and John on the other in the plaid shirt and tie he was wearing this morning. She puts a dog next to each of them: Tupac next to Dad, Pippi next to Mac, and Rocky next to John. Then she adds a yellow sun and a bunch of flowers in the yard because Mrs. Carter can suck it. The flowers are unrealistic because if John was going to stop working for long enough to plant anything, he’d probably plant vegetables, but whatever -- Mrs. Carter doesn’t know John. 

Mrs. Carter wants to talk about the picture when she’s done, but Mac is done talking. Even if Dad does pick up the VA stress ball from Miss Williams, there’s no way he’s giving it back to Mac. Eventually Mrs. Carter gives up and sends her back to class, where Mac has to do her math workbook at the Cooling Off Desk in the back of the room. (Darius has to do his at Miss Williams’s desk at the front of the room. It’s probably as far apart from each other as she could get them.)

At pick-up time, Mr. Jackson comes by to take Miss Williams’s dismissal chart and the single file line of kids so Miss Williams can stay in the classroom with Mac and Darius and wait for their parents. This delights everyone in the class and causes some decidedly non-silent giggles and whispers. 

Dad arrives before Mrs. Lafayette, and Miss Williams sends Mac and Darius to wait in the hall with their coats and backpacks while they have a chat. It seems like they talk for a really long time. Darius keeps looking over at Mac; if he’s fishing for another apology, he’s not going to get it. Mac already said sorry in front of Miss Williams. She didn’t mean it, and she’s not doing it again. 

When Dad emerges from 4-Notre Dame’s classroom, he is holding Mac’s drawing and the VA stress ball and he is making his blank Marine face, which means he is super, super angry. It seems like even Darius can tell how angry he is, because he kind of shrinks back into the wall, away from Dad. 

“Can I have my focus fidget back?” Mac asks.

“No,” Dad says very firmly, and he pointedly throws it in the hallway trash can. He thrusts Mac’s drawing into her hands and walks off down the hall, his combat walk. Mac follows Dad. She can feel Darius staring at them.

Dad doesn’t say anything on the whole walk home. When they get to the house, he opens the door with his key and sits down on the edge of the couch and scrubs his hand through his short hair. “We do not,” Dad says slowly, “hit people. That is not how we solve problems. Do you understand?”

Mac nods.

“Do you understand, Mackenzie?” Dad repeats. He sounds super serious.

“Yes, sir,” Mac says. 

“If you have a problem with someone, you need to talk about it and tell them how you feel. That’s the only way things are going to get better.”

“How would you know?” Mac mumbles really, really quietly.

“What did you say?” Dad says, still angry but probably not angry enough to have heard.

“Yes, sir,” Mac says louder. 

“Get some paper out of your school bag and go sit at the kitchen table,” Dad says. “I want you to write a note apologizing to Darius for hitting him and one apologizing to your teacher for interrupting her lesson.”

Mac winds up having to write both notes twice, because Dad checks her first draft and makes her fix her spelling. Then he sends her upstairs to read _Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing_. In California, being on punishment usually meant no TV and no playdates with friends, but in St. Louis Mac doesn’t really watch the TV because by the time she’s done with homework John is usually home and she is his sous chef. She also doesn’t have anyone to play with except the dogs, so there isn’t much Dad can do to punish her.

She’s still hiding in her room when John gets home. As usual, he knocks -- Mac’s noticed that he always does it in the same quick pattern, like a little song. 

“Come in!” Mac says. 

She’s lying sideways across her bed with her feet up on the wall, and John says, “Take your shoes off if you’re gonna do that or you’ll ruin the paint.”

“Sorry,” Mac says and kicks them off; they land on the bed.

John loiters awkwardly in the open doorway for a bit, like he’s working up to say something but doesn’t know how.

“Dad already yelled at me about hitting Darius, so you don’t have to. I already wrote my apology letters.”

John looks relieved. “Well, for the record, your dad is right. Getting into fights is not okay, and it’s especially stupid at school.”

Mac doesn’t say anything back. She’s still not really sorry, but she’s definitely regretting how much this incident is going to make her life suck for the next week or two at least.

“Anyway, we still need to do that poster, right? So let’s get downstairs, Million Dollar Baby.”

John and Mac listen to Eminem while they decorate Mac’s visual aid oaktag for her persuasive essay on pitbull bans. (It turns out that John does own a turntable, and Dad did bring his records from Oceanside. Now they’re all set up on one of the shelves that John and Dad built.) John even takes some pictures of Mac hugging the three dogs so she can put them on her poster board. She already did final drafts of all of the writing earlier in the week because Dad made her and it wasn’t like she had anything better to do, anyway. 

Dad, who is folding laundry on the other end of the high table, seems annoyed that Mac is having so much fun when she is supposed to be in big trouble right now, but it is a school project, so there isn’t really anything he can do about it.

What he does do is walk her up to her classroom the next morning to get a visual on her handing her apology notes to Miss Williams and Darius. Usually, parents are not allowed to go up to the classrooms in the morning, but today Dad is not the only one; because of the visual aid requirement for the persuasive essay, lots of parents are helping their kids carry posters upstairs. Mac leaves her poster on the designated table, hangs her backpack and jacket up in her cubby, and takes out her homework folder, which has the notes in it. She brings her note to Miss Williams first. She needs to shake her hand and say ‘good morning’ before homeroom starts, anyway. Miss Williams says ‘thank you,’ but she’s obviously distracted by all the parents asking her questions.

Mac then makes her way to Darius’s desk, which is in the front corner of the room so Miss Williams can keep an eye on him and also so he can stand up and work on the counter over the cubbies. If he tried to actually sit through a whole lesson, he would be so annoying that someone in 4-Notre Dame would definitely strangle him to death. Darius is already here even though it’s early, which Mac expected. Darius isn’t one of the kids that eats breakfast at school, but his dad always drops him off early so he can ‘calm down and settle in.’ He is currently sitting on top of his desk, not in his chair, reading a folded newspaper -- possibly even for real.

“This is for you,” Mac says, handing him the envelope. “I’m sorry I hit you.” She looks over at the door and sees Dad nod at her and disappear. 

“It’s cool,” Darius says. “I’m sorry I got you in so much trouble. I had no idea your dad was so intense. Never seen a white parent wig out on their kid like that.”

Mac shrugs. 

“What is his deal, anyway?”

Mac is about to tell Darius to shut up and mind his own beeswax, but then she realizes that he might be the perfect person to tell the truth to. After all, even if he thinks Dad is crazy, what can he possibly do? Grown-ups never listen to Darius because he’s in trouble, like, ninety percent of the time. “He was in the Marines for, like, a really long time,” Mac says. “Since way before I was born. He just quit -- that’s why we moved here after the school year already started.”

“Wow,” Darius says. “So he was really in the war and stuff?” 

“Yeah,” Mac says. “He was infantry the whole time. That’s the guys who actually patrol with guns. And he was also in this special, elite group called Force Recon.”

“Hardcore!” Darius says. 

“Pretty much,” Mac says.

“Well, you’re really strong for a girl,” Darius says. “Do you play baseball?”

“No. You’re the second person to ask me that, though.”

“You totally should play with us at recess,” he says, and then he gets off his desk to rummage around in the shelf inside. “Get between me and Miss Williams,” he hisses quietly. 

Mac isn’t sure what he’s up to, but she takes a risk and goes along with it. Once she’s blocked Miss Williams’s view of Darius (it’s not like Miss Williams is looking anyway -- she’s still dealing with the parents), he draws something out of his desk shelf and shoves it into Mac’s hands as quickly as he can. It’s Mac’s VA stress ball. 

“I got it out of the trash after you guys left,” Darius whispers. “I wouldn’t keep it at school anymore, though. If Miss Williams sees it, she might rat you out to your dad. She’s mad into phoning parents. I swear she talks to mine like once a week.”

“Thanks,” Mac says, genuinely shocked.

“No big,” Darius shrugs. “Same team, right, Mackenzie?” He holds out his fist for her to bump.

Mac bumps it. “You can call me Mac,” she says.

. . . . . . . . . .

Saturday starts like a normal day: Dad, Mac, and John wake up early for PT. In Forest Park, John runs ahead with the dogs, and he beats them back to the house for the first shower. When Dad and Mac arrive, Dad makes coffee, and Mac feeds the dogs once they show her good obedience. (Pippi has gotten much, much better behaved since Mac started training her with the nonfiction book John bought her.) While they eat from the floor, she feels around in the feed bag in the closet for the gun lock: it’s still there and still buried under the food. Good. Mac is actually pretty proud of thinking of such an excellent hiding place for it, but unfortunately it doesn’t solve the problem of how to get Dad to actually put the lock on his gun, which is sort of the point. 

After breakfast, John leaves to go hiking an hour away at a state park with some of his friends. He invites Dad and Mac to come, but Dad says no. Mac isn’t sure if it’s because she’s still on punishment or because he doesn’t want to meet John’s non-Marine friends. Mac, having nothing better to do, heads out to the yard to try to teach Pippi to roll over.

About twenty minutes later, Dad comes out holding his cell phone. “Call for you,” he says, holding it out. 

“For me?” Mac says, shocked.

Dad just waves the phone until she grabs it. There’s a number displayed across the screen with a 314 area code, but it’s obviously not a number saved into Dad’s contacts because there’s no name.

“Hello?” she says.

“Yo, Mac!” says a voice on the other end.

“...Darius?” Mac says, surprised.

“Yeah!” he answers. “Do you want to come to City Museum with me and my dad? Don’t worry -- it’s not, like, an educational museum. It’s actually cool.”

“Sure,” Mac says. “Let me just ask my dad.” She holds the phone away from her face and says, “Can I go to a museum with Darius?”

“Didn’t you punch him two days ago?” Dad says.

“Yep.”

Dad gestures for the phone. “I need to talk to his parents,” he says.

“My dad wants to talk to your parents,” Mac tells Darius, who clearly doesn’t bother covering the phone’s microphone before yelling, “MOM!” at the top of his lungs. 

Dad looks really serious on the phone with Mrs. Lafayette, and Mac keeps her fingers crossed in her jacket pocket. She really wants to go to this museum with Darius. She hasn’t had any playdates since moving to St. Louis. She knows she’s supposed to be on punishment, but she thinks that Darius being the kid she fought with might actually work in her favor here: Dad will probably think the fact that he wants to hang out with her means she did an excellent job of apologizing, even though she didn’t really do anything to make Darius chill. When Mac hears Dad say, “Sure, I can walk her over there in ten minutes,” she squeals and jumps in the air, which inspires Pippi to also jump and start barking. 

Dad has never liked her going on field trips with other people, and, predictably, he’s even more stressed because he doesn’t really know Darius’s parents. Darius lives six blocks away, and the whole way there, Dad quizzes her. What’s his cell phone number? What’s John’s cell phone number? What’s John’s work phone number? What should she do if she gets separated from Darius’s family? (Find a museum worker to call Mr. Lafayette over the loudspeaker.) He also makes her show him John’s SLMPD detective business card, which has his badge number and precinct on it. In a really big emergency, she’s supposed to show it to a police officer, and she has to keep it always in the safe pocket in the inside lining of her winter jacket. Dad gives her an extra for her jeans pocket, because she will probably take off her jacket at the museum. He also gives her cash for lunch and the museum’s admission. 

On Darius’s street, the houses are much bigger than John’s, and they’re made of brick instead of wood. Moments after Dad rings the doorbell, Mac can hear a scuffle on the other side of the front door. 

“I got it! I got it!” says a little, high-pitched voice.

“No, I’ve got it!” says a more familiar voice. “It’s _my_ friend!”

When the door is yanked open, Darius is holding back a little girl who looks about six and is shrieking and trying to kick him. 

“Hi,” says Mac. “Is that your sister?”

“I’m Jada!” chirps the little girl.

“Hi, Jada,” Dad says. “Darius.” He holds out his hand for Darius to shake -- like literally every Marine Mac knows, Dad is a stickler for a ‘firm handshake’ -- but when Darius offers his fist instead, Dad goes with it, sort of smiling. 

They walk through a foyer exploding with jackets and boots and into an open living and dining room. A teenager with a zillion skinny braids in her hair is watching TV and painting her nails on the couch. 

“I didn’t know you had sisters,” Mac says. 

“Brothers, too,” Darius says glumly.

“Darius is number three of five,” says the teenager on the couch. “Which literally explains everything you need to know about what’s wrong with his personality.”

“No one cares what you think!” Darius tells her.

“Maya!” says a woman emerging into the hallway next to the stairs, “Do I smell nail polish in my living room?”

“I put a towel down, Mom,” says the teenager. “The couch is fine.”

“Bathroom! Now!” Darius’s mom says, and, with an exaggerated roll of her eyes, the teenager who must be Maya heads for the stairs. “I’m Camille,” Darius’s mom says, extending her hand for Dad to shake. “It’s nice to meet you…”

“Evan,” Dad says. “Nice to meet you, too.”

“Well, Evan, my husband’s taking the kids to the City Museum -- just Darius and his little brother Shawn and Shawn’s friend -- the girls are staying here, and Charles is off with his friends.” It’s sort of weird hearing someone call Dad something other than “Gunnery Sergeant Stafford” or a nickname, but Mac guesses that’s how things are now. 

Darius is looking at Dad’s feet, and he whispers in Mac’s ear, “Are those your dad’s war boots?”

“Shut up,” Mac hisses. “And yes.”

After Dad meets both of Darius’s parents, Mac all but pushes him out the door as he tries to remind her _again_ about the phone numbers and emergency contingency plans.

“Your dad is really hyped about you getting lost,” Darius observes.

“That’s because he only has one kid and she’s cute,” Maya informs him, descending the staircase with her newly finished nails. “If you disappeared I wouldn’t be too concerned.”

Darius sticks his tongue out at Maya as they pass her on their way up the stairs. 

“Proving my point,” she says.

It turns out that the room Darius shares with Charles and Shawn -- it has two bunk beds -- is already occupied by Shawn and his friend Ryan, who immediately shoot them with Nerf guns when they get through the door. Mac and Darius execute a tactical egress through the bathroom that leads out into what must be the girls’ bedroom, which is yellow. Darius bars the door with a chair from what must be Maya’s desk and begins jumping on one of the beds.

“Are you supposed to be doing that?” Mac asks.

“Nope,” Darius answers. Then he points to the wall behind the bed, which is covered in magazine cutouts held up with fancy patterned tape. “Those are the celebrity dudes my sister has a crush on,” he explains. 

“One of them is an old lady,” Mac points out.

“Oh, that’s a Supreme Court judge,” Darius says. “I think that’s supposed to be aspirational.” He says “aspirational” with a grand flourish and collapses onto Maya’s bed. Mac doesn’t know what that word means, but Darius seems to, so she asks him.

“It’s like, your big goals, or something,” he explains. “Like how all our homerooms are named after colleges so we want to go to college.”

“Is that why they do that?” Mac asks.

“Yup. Pretty lame. My parents will make me go to college either way.”

Mac shrugs. “My dad didn’t go to college,” she says.

“Really?” Darius asks.

“John did, though,” Mac hurries to add.

“Who’s John?” Darius asks, throwing a pig-shaped stuffed animal up in the air and catching it.

“We live with him,” Mac says. 

“Is he your stepdad?” Darius says.

“No.”

“Are you related?”

“No.”

“Do you have to do what he says?”

Mac ponders this. “Yeah, but he’s cool.”

“Sounds like stepdad to me,” Darius says.

Mac doesn’t get the opportunity to tell Darius his adult classification system is deeply flawed because at that moment Jada skips through the door and yells at the top of her lungs, “MAYA, DARIUS IS ON YOUR BED PLAYING WITH WILBUR.”

Darius drops the pig plushie and they execute another tactical egress.

. . . . . . . . . .

Darius wasn’t kidding about the City Museum: it’s like a giant playground with all sorts of things to climb on and a giant slide that goes down ten stories. Mac is very glad she came with Darius and his dad and not her own, because Dad would definitely freak out about not being able to see her all the time on the climbing structures. They spend several hours there, and when Mr. Lafayette drives them back to Darius’s house in the minivan, Mrs. Lafayette and Darius’s other three siblings have already ordered pizza, so Mac phones home and asks to stay for dinner. Miraculously, Dad says yes. 

Mac is in an excellent mood when she finally gets home. Pippi chases her up the staircase, and Mac lets her climb up on the bed with her for a cuddle. “I might finally have a friend, buddy!” She says.

She’s not at all on her guard, then, when John does his little song-knock on her door. “Come in!” she calls, and she’s surprised to see his face looking very serious. Mac hastily reviews everything she’s done in the last few days that could possibly get her in trouble, and she can’t think of anything besides hitting Darius -- surely that’s been resolved now that they made up?

Then John pulls the red gun lock with the Veterans Crisis Line number out of his pocket and drops it on her bed next to Pippi. “Had to feed the dogs since you were out,” he says shortly.

“Oh,” Mac says, frozen in place. She doesn’t know what else to say.

“Why were you hiding this, kiddo? And why do you have it in the first place?”

Mac shrugs.

“Mackenzie,” John says firmly. Mac wonders how he knows that’s her in-trouble name: is it a grown-up thing, or did Dad tell him?

“The guy at the VA gave it to me,” she says. “He was handing out things when I went with Dad.”

“What would you want with a gun lock, Mac?” John says.

Mac shrugs again. “He said you’re supposed to keep your gun unloaded in a safe.”

“He’s right,” John says.

Mac remembers what the VA man said about finding a ‘safe adult.’ She’s pretty sure John qualifies, but it still feels like treason when she says, “Dad sleeps with it next to him. Loaded, I’m pretty sure.”

John says a lot of swear words.

“Am I in trouble?” Mac asks when he’s finished.

“No,” John says. “You are not.”

The way he says it makes Mac ask, “Is Dad in trouble?”

“Definitely yes,” John says, and he sort of slams the door on the way out. The basement is too far away for Mac to hear whatever he says to Dad, but she can hear snatches of both of their voices, which means they’re probably yelling. Pippi buries her head in Mac’s lap, which is nice. Eventually, Mac hears the sound of the front door slamming, which means one of them has left the house — Mac has to listen for a long time to figure out who now that there are no voices, but when the sound of footsteps eventually leads up the stairs and across the hall to John’s bedroom she has her answer.

Timidly, she crosses the hallway herself and pushes the door open with a finger. She’s never actually been in John’s room before, and she’s surprised to see it looks far less finished than her own. The bed in the center of one wall is neatly made with proper corners, just like how Dad makes his bed, but the walls have lots of bright white patches on them, like someone took the time to plug up all the holes from the last owner but then never got around to painting.

“Mac?” John says. He’s sitting at the foot of the bed, and before she came in he had his head in his hands, but now he’s looking at her.

“Did my dad leave?” she says.

“He just went for a walk,” John says, even though it’s clearly not _just_ a walk — it’s a mad walk. “He’ll be back, kiddo.”

“Is he going to be okay?” Mac asks. 

“He’ll be fine,” John says.

Mac knows better, is the thing. “Lots of guys aren’t fine,” she says. “Lots of guys kill themselves.”

John stands up and walks over to her, but he kneels down so his eyes are level with hers before he says, “I _promise_ I will not let that happen to him. Okay? It’s not going to happen.”

And Mac, for some reason, really believes him. “Okay,” she says. When she goes in for a hug, John kind of awkwardly pats her on the back, but he lets her bury her face in his shoulder.

“This is not your problem to worry about,” he says. “Your dad and I can handle this.”

Mac keeps on hiding in his shoulder. He kind of smells like Dad, which makes sense, since they’re probably using the same soap and laundry detergent.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey there, all two of you that are reading this! This is the end of Part I. Part II is complete but needs heavier editing than Part I, so the chapter-posting tempo may slow down a little. Not too much, though — I’ve banned myself from watching Stranger Things 3 until the whole thing is finished and posted, so I remain highly motivated.


	7. Part II: Chapter One

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> John babysits.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry about this huge posting delay, guys! Real life took over.

When John comes downstairs, Mac is lying on the kitchen floor in her usual spot, cuddling Pippi and still in her PT gear. When Evan and Mac first arrived, John found it strange-bordering-on-alarming that Evan was apparently training his nine-year-old daughter in Marine Corps survival skills, but Mac doesn’t seem bothered in the slightest. Then again, why would she be? She’s never known anything different.

“Any breakfast requests?” John asks.

Mac sits up straight the moment she sees him, her expression sliding rapidly from lazy to concerned. “Are you going to a funeral?” she asks.

“No,” John says, momentarily confused. “Oh,” he realizes, “you mean because of this?” He gestures at the dark gray suit he’s wearing and Mac nods. “No, I just have to go to court today.”

“Family court?” Mac asks.

“No…” John says, even more confused. “Criminal court. Someone I arrested is standing trial today, so I’ve been called as a witness.”

“Oh.” Mac is visibly relieved for reasons John can’t fathom. “Do you have to do that a lot?”

John shrugs. “More than I’d like,” he says. “It’s sort of boring, and I’m not really a suit guy.”

“You’re a beardy plaid guy,” Mac agrees. 

“Eggs okay?” John asks, already taking the carton out of the fridge. Mac nods and goes for the mixing bowl and whisk. Before Evan and Mac came to live with him, John almost never cooked breakfast on weekdays — instead he’d prep a week of oatmeal or muffin tin omelets on Sunday to be microwaved as needed. But cooking with Mac in the mornings and evenings has become an unexpectedly comforting routine; she’s surprisingly capable, and she likes to chatter to him as she helps. John’s never considered himself to be much of a kid person — when they were growing up, Sarah was the one who babysat and worked at summer camps — so he was surprised to discover that he’s genuinely interested in what she has to say. When they first arrived, John thought her to be a quiet kid, but it turns out that was just initial shyness — now that she’s used to him, she talks incessantly. This morning, her overriding concern seems to be Halloween.

“I’m going to be Black Widow, obviously, since I’m the only girl, but Darius and Jaequan have been fighting over who gets to be Falcon for, like, two weeks. Andy’s Captain America. I guess whoever loses can either be the Winter Soldier or Nick Fury, but they need to decide, like, now, because it’s their last day to buy costumes.”

“My money’s on Jaequan losing that one,” John says.

“You don’t even know Jaequan,” Mac points out.

“No,” John says, “but I sure know Darius.” Darius has been over for playdates three times now, and he is essentially a small human juggernaut. Unfortunately, he’s decided that John’s house is ‘legendary’ because of the pitbulls and the pool and ping pong table in the basement. “Got your jokes ready for trick-or-treating?”

Mac wrinkles her forehead in obvious puzzlement. “What jokes?”

“The cheesy ones you tell so you can get candy.”

“That’s not a thing.”

“It is in St. Louis.”

“Mac, shower time!” Evan calls from the top of the stairwell.

Mac hands John the whisk and scampers off, yelling over her shoulder, “You’re messing with me, John!”

Evan descends the stairs in what John has come to think of as his civilian battle dress uniform. The famed maroon do-rag has been lost to the decade of radio silence between them, but Evan still wears his jeans and his plain white t-shirts far baggier than current trends dictate. He’s also managed to acquire a few flannel shirts in an apparent concession to the rapidly dropping temperature of the midwestern autumn. John spotted a familiar-looking pair of carefully maintained white sneakers among his belongings in the basement, but since his arrival he’s only ever seen Evan wear his regulation combat boots. 

“Want eggs?” John asks by way of greeting. Evan nods shortly. “Thanks,” he says in a stiffly polite tone. Mac may have warmed to John in their month of cohabitation, but Evan remains an eerily colorless copy of his former self, frequently stuck in a hyper-polite gear once reserved for interactions with John’s parents and their superior officers. He crosses to the coffee maker and begins to grind beans while John cracks the eggs into the mixing bowl.

John has a particular knack for cracking eggs single-handed, and, back when they lived together, Evan was openly fascinated by this skill. He’d comment on it no matter how often he saw John do it, and he once wasted an entire carton of eggs trying — unsuccessfully — to replicate the trick himself. John can feel Evan’s eyes following the motions of his hand now, but Evan says nothing until the eggs are nearly cooked and the coffee maker has beeped.

“I gotta ask a favor,” he says.

“Yeah? What is it?” John says without turning around. 

“Got a gig tonight.”

At this he does turn. “A gig doing what?”

“Security or whatever. Basically being a bouncer for some bar downtown. It’s just Thursday, Friday, Saturday nights.”

“You sure that’s a good idea?” John asks, already envisioning the pandemonium that could ensue if some drunk asshole manages to trigger the terrified violence that seems to always be simmering just beneath Evan’s wooden exterior.

Evan makes an expression reminiscent of the one he makes when confronted with mushrooms. “Couldn’t exactly get a day gig, could I?” he says, “What with all the mornings I gotta spend at the VA.”

John glares at Evan. “Q-tip, if you’re expecting me to apologize for making you seek treatment for your obviously debilitating PTSD, you’re going to be waiting a long fucking time.”

“Wasn’t holding my breath,” Evan says. He pours a cup of coffee, black, and hands it to John before he continues: an olive branch. John blows across the surface of the liquid before surrendering to his first sip. Evan still remembers how to make proper coffee. “Darius’s mom said I could drop Mac there around five. Can you get her when you get off work?”

“Sure,” John agrees. 

“Thanks,” Evan says. “Wanna put the number in your supercomputer?”

John rolls his eyes as he draws out his iPhone. Evan rattles off the Lafayettes’ home number from memory, a trick John knows he also taught Mac. 

“It shouldn’t be a late one,” John says. “I mean, sometimes that changes, but I’ll call if it does.”

“Thanks, man,” Evan says, handing John a mug of the finished coffee. “I’ll take the dogs out when I get back from talking about my feelings.” For a moment their eyes lock and John is sure Evan’s going to say something else, but then Mac comes barreling down the stairs in her school uniform, brandishing her brush and demanding Evan create some complicated braided style in her hair. Whatever Evan was or wasn’t going to say is quickly lost in the chaos of consuming breakfast, letting the dogs out, and rushing out the door — John to court and Evan to walk Mac to school before his VA psychotherapy group.

Court is bad enough on the best of days — the lawyers from the DA’s office constantly reminding him how to conduct himself on the stand as if all cops are brain-dead neanderthals, the terrible coffee, the damn suit. But today his number must really be up, because when the judge calls a recess for lunch and John streams out of his courtroom with everybody else, he hears a familiar voice shout in the hallway, “John! John Christeson, don’t you pretend you can’t hear me!”

John briefly attempts to do just that, but then Keith, his partner, grabs his shoulder and says, “Hey, John, it’s your sister,” gesturing expansively with his other hand at the figure down the hallway with flat-ironed hair and a briefcase.

“Uh, yeah, thanks,” John says, and he reluctantly stops to allow Sarah to catch up to him. 

She’s in full lawyer mode, and her high heels click on the floor. “Let’s grab lunch,” she says in a tone that leaves no room for objections. John grits his teeth together and gives Keith a quick wave in farewell. John isn’t particularly looking forward to this conversation, but he supposes he couldn’t avoid it forever — he probably only managed it this long because Evan’s arrival conveniently coincided with Sarah’s return to work post-maternity leave. Presumably she had her own fires to put out, but apparently now she’s back to worrying unnecessarily about John’s personal life, such as it is.

Sarah spends more time at the courthouse than John does, so she has a preferred sandwich place a few blocks away — the guy behind the counter recognizes her and starts her order without her even saying anything. 

Sarah at least has the sense to open the conversation on the neutral topic of logistics: “So, you’re meeting us at nine-thirty on Sunday, right? At the church?” Her son, Jasper, is being baptized on Sunday; John is about to be a godparent for the second time. He wonders if he’ll do any better this time around — God only knows he dropped the ball with Mac for the first decade of her life. 

“Oh, is it nine-thirty?” he says in mock surprise. “I hadn’t gleaned that from the twenty text messages you sent me and the dozen voicemails I got from Mom.”

“I see maturity is still overrated in your universe,” Sarah quips.

“I was planning to wear jeans and my Metallica t-shirt. That’s cool, right?”

“Perfect,” Sarah says. “The service can double as your funeral, since Mom will murder you before you get through the doors of the church. It will be very efficient. Double-tasking.” Sarah whips out her debit card to pay for both of their sandwiches before John has a chance to object. John hates it when she does stuff like that. He’s pretty sure it’s just garden-variety older sister patronizing behavior, but she _does_ make more money than he does, which somehow makes it worse.

“How’s Jasper?” John asks when they’ve successfully elbowed their way to one of the tiny tables. 

“He’s good. He’s bigger. Which you’d know if you’d seen him in the last month.” Sarah takes a bite of her grilled chicken sandwich and arches one eyebrow pointedly at John. It’s a skill she perfected at age twelve in front of the same mirrored bureau that currently resides in Mac’s bedroom, and it’s always driven John nuts, which she well knows.

“Sorry,” John says, attempting evasion. “Been a bit busy lately.”

“Boy, have you,” Sarah says, and apparently that’s all the invitation she needs to open the floor for this discussion. “What, did you think I wasn’t going to find out about this whole debacle with Evan? Mom and I talk, you know.” John does know, and usually he’s pleased that Sarah and Mom speak on the phone every day, because it lets him get away with only hearing from Mom once or twice a week himself. Unfortunately, it also means they share information at a rate that would put most middle school cafeterias to shame, and they often invent trouble where none exists.

“It’s not a debacle,” John says. “Your overprotective hostility is unnecessary.”

“Mom says he’s _living_ with you. And his daughter. What the hell is going on? And when did he even leave the Corps?”

“Recently.” John takes a large bite of his own roast beef sandwich to avoid elaborating.

“What on earth are you thinking, John? I thought you two hadn’t talked in about ten years.” Sarah has now abandoned the pretense of eating her sandwich in favor of a full-on argument. That’s the thing about Sarah: she can jump straight back into any argument, no warning orders, no matter how long it’s been. In this case, it’s been years since they last discussed Evan.

“Well. Obviously, now we have.”

“Look, John, I’m not clueless. I know you two were more than just Marine Corps buddies. And I remember what an absolute train wreck you were after that fight or breakup or whatever it was.”

John hurriedly scans the crowded cafe, but he doesn’t see any of his colleagues. “Say that a little louder, will you?” he hisses.

“Don’t worry,” Sarah says, vaguely waving her hand at the rest of the noisy cafe. “I already checked for cops — you’re good. God, I hate that you can’t be out at work. I wish someone would hurry the hell up and get a discrimination lawsuit up to the state Supreme Court already.”

John shrugs. “It’s not that I _can’t_ be out. It’s not like DADT. It’s just… not really worth it.” He had Sarah look into the legalese of it all when he was first hired, and Missouri has no official law or ruling precedent preventing discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. And even if Sarah does get that positive state Supreme Court ruling she’s hoping for, it wouldn’t stop an inevitable handful of colleagues from seeing him in a new— potentially unflattering— light. John has seen no particular evidence that leads him to believe any of his colleagues to be homophobic, but more than half of them _are_ Catholic. And not the passive, go-to-Mass-out-of-habit kind like John’s parents — the send-their-kids-to-parochial-schools, say-Grace-before-dinner, don’t-eat-meat-on-Fridays-during-Lent kind. 

John’s always sort of assumed he’d come out at work someday, when he had a relationship worth the trouble. Of course, the odds of him developing such a relationship seem slim, given that his romantic life consists of a handful of one-night-stands interspersed with the occasional attempt at dating app relationships that consistently fizzle out by the second or third date. And even that’s been on hold for the last month, since he’s been sharing space with Evan and Mac. John wonders if Evan would care at all if he told him he was going on a date. He remembers a time when Evan was prone to fits of extreme jealousy, but that, of course, was years ago. These days he may not give a shit who John sleeps with. Or maybe he would, still. John wonders which would piss him off more: knowing John was off somewhere fucking a woman, or knowing John was off somewhere fucking another man.

The other man, probably. Especially if said man was the one doing the fucking. Evan’s territorial like that. Or, at least, he used to be.

“Look, John,” Sarah says, “you’re an adult. You make your own choices. I get it. But I’m _worried_ about this. I may not have details, but I know he hurt you before. What’s to stop him from doing it again?”

“Sarah, he’s not interested in doing it again. He’s got other shit on his plate.”

“I don’t understand why his shit needs to be your problem,” Sarah says.

“You don’t need to understand everything, Sarah,” John replies, and he returns emphatically to his sandwich.

. . . . . . . . . .

In the end, John does need to stay late at work, and Mac winds up having dinner at her friend Darius’s house. “I’m so sorry to be so late,” he says when Mrs. Lafayette answers the door with a little girl, clearly younger than Mac, glued to her hip.

“Oh, it’s no problem,” Mrs. Lafayette says. “Mackenzie’s an angel. It’s nice to meet you, by the way. I’m Camille.” She holds out her hand for John to shake.

“John,” he says. “Likewise.”

Camille and John fight their way through the coats and sporting gear in the vestibule.

“John!” Mac calls from the living room, where she appears to be practicing some sort of dance routine with Darius and a teenage girl who must be his sister. “You were right about the Halloween jokes!”

“I know I was,” John calls back. “Let’s get moving, kiddo.”

“Darius loaned me a book so I can learn some,” she says, brandishing said book before shoving it into her backpack.

“It’s cool — I already know, like, a million,” Darius says.

“Are the jokes not a thing in California?” Mrs. Lafayette says. “I like it when the kids have to earn their candy. I give pencils to the ones who don’t have a joke.”

John laughs. “That’s pretty hardcore. Maybe I’ll try that tomorrow.” Halloween is typically a pain in the ass for John. Not only is it one of the most hellish days of the year to be a law enforcement officer (New Years, Cinco de Mayo, and the 4th of July also rank), but it also makes the dogs all excitable and he has to exile them to the backyard since most kids are scared of them. In the past, he’s generally forgotten to buy candy until the very last minute and has always run out too early, as well, though this year he’s already all set since Q-tip bought it two weeks ago. He wonders if he’ll feel differently about the inconvenience now that he has a kid benefitting from it. Well, not his own kid, of course, but still.

“Maya is actually taking Darius and company through the neighborhood tomorrow,” Mrs. Lafayette says as Mac grabs her coat from a hook by the door.

“Friendly reminder that child labor is illegal!” the teenager calls from the living room. Looking at her more carefully for the first time, John notes that her hair is styled very similarly to how Mac’s been wearing hers the last few days; likely she is the source of inspiration.

“Maya, you were the one who asked to stay past curfew at your Halloween party. You want extra privileges, you need to earn them,” retorts an unimpressed Mrs. Lafayette. 

“Yeah, you need to earn privileges,” Darius echoes gleefully. Maya glares at him.

“And you and your friends are going to behave for your sister and not make yourselves a nuisance to the neighbors,” Mrs. Lafayette says to Darius with equal sternness. 

Darius just grins evilly, but Mac says, “Don’t worry, Maya, we’ll be good.”

“You’re not the one I’m worried about!” Maya calls back.

The Lafayettes live just a short walk away from home, but since John stopped there on his way back from work, he has to put Mac in his car, which leads him to realize that the way he has it set up is not at all kid-friendly. John has a Subaru Forester, but he typically treats it more like a pick-up truck, leaving the back seats folded down to accommodate his hiking and skiing gear. If driving with Mac is going to be a feature of his life now, he really should clear that stuff out. (Though where to put it, now that Evan’s living in his basement, is a pressing question.) For the moment, he just sticks Mac in the front. Evan’s truck doesn’t even have a backseat, so it’s not like this is new for her.

“Mac, it’s late, so go straight up to brush your teeth and put on your pajamas before you do your reading,” John says when they pull up to the house.

“Can I read the joke book instead of my fiction book?” Mac wheedles. She’s very good at weaseling her way out of reading whenever possible, which John finds a bit alien — as a kid, he always loved reading.

“Sure, as long as it’s twenty minutes,” he says.

Inside, the dogs whine and pace around the kitchen in greeting, so John takes the gate down and lets them into the yard while Mac heads upstairs. By the time he comes back in to change out of his suit, Mac is already in her pajamas and brushing her teeth in the bathroom. She’s loudly humming the tune of “Row Your Boat,” as she does so, just like every evening.

“Why do you do that?” John asks, loitering in the doorway.

“Do what?” Mac says around a mouthful of foaming toothpaste.

“Hum when you brush your teeth.”

“It’s the ‘brush your teeth’ song,” she says, barely coherent.

“The what now?”

“You know. ‘Brush, brush, brush your teeth, gently make them clean!’” Mac has to spit after that.

“Never heard that one.”

“I think Dad stole it from Mrs. Garza,” Mac says. “He’s very extra about dental hygiene.”

“Yeah, well,” John says, “in the Corps, if you don’t get your cavities taken care of and then you need to deploy in a hurry, they just pull out the whole tooth.”

“Eurgh!” Mac exclaims, obviously horrified.

“Yep. They got Q-tip before we shipped out to Matilda. Uh, before you were born.”

Mac spits again and rinses her mouth and her brush. “Can you start my reading timer?”

John puts twenty-four minutes on his phone timer. Mac has to read twenty minutes a night per her teacher’s instructions, but he’s been sneakily increasing the amount by a minute each week and so far she’s yet to call him on it. Then he heads to his room and hangs up his suit in his closet, which is sort of a mess because he hasn’t yet assembled the closet unit he bought to sort it out. Once in his sweatpants, he heads back downstairs to assemble some sort of dinner from leftovers. 

His timer rings just as he’s loading his plate into the dishwasher, and he climbs the stairs to tell Mac it’s time for lights out.

“Hey, John!” Mac calls as he approaches her open doorway. She’s sitting in bed with her book open. Pippi’s in bed with her, but John decides not to say anything: if she doesn’t care, he doesn’t either. 

“Yeah?” he asks.

“What’s a vampire’s favorite drink?”

“Don’t know,” John says, even though he does: he heard this one last year.

“Bloodveiser!” Mac says, and descends into giggles as though she genuinely finds it hilarious.

John laughs, more at her than at the joke. It’s strange how children’s moods are more contagious than adults’; just seeing Mac happy is more often than not enough to cheer him up even when he’s in a funk.

It’s stranger still to remember how much he hated Mac once, though of course that was never really about Mac at all. 

“That’s a good one, Macaroni, but it’s time for lights out now,” he says, crossing her room to turn off the lamp on her desk. When he gets there, however, he’s distracted by a picture she’s propped up on the top shelf -- it looks like an illustration of Mac, Evan, himself, and the dogs standing in front of the house. It’s not a particularly realistic rendering, with the flowers and the brighter blue paint on the house’s exterior, but it’s nice, John thinks, that Mac sees them this way. 

“You do this, kiddo?” he asks.

“Sure,” Mac says, handing him her joke book and squashing down her pillow. “It’s just a counselor picture, though.”

“It’s pretty good,” John says. 

“Thanks,” Mac says.

John hesitates after flicking off the lamp. “Should I kiss you good night? Or is that weird?” he asks.

“You’re overthinking this,” Mac says, so John leans down and plants a kiss on her warm forehead.

“Night, John,” Mac says.


	8. Part II: Chapter Two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> John goes for a hike. Evan continues to avoid life.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeah, so... I really have no excuse for not publishing this sooner, given that it was literally written months ago and only wound up needing about an hour of edits. So I’m gonna just leave this here and slink off....

Evan is already awake when John stumbles downstairs in his pajamas on Saturday, which isn’t precisely a surprise, though Evan couldn’t have made it home before four AM. John remembers Evan having trouble sleeping post-deployment even as far back as the beginning of OIF, and after that shitty Fallujah deployment in 2004 he could hardly sleep alone at all. Even though they were in barracks housing at the time and both had single beds, John would frequently wake to find Evan curled around him like they used to do for warmth in country.

John isn’t about to suggest that as an option today, though. “Have you tried those pills they gave you for sleeping?” he says instead, heading for the coffee maker.

“Man, why are you askin’ me questions you already know the answer to? I know you count ‘em.”

John does, in fact, count them. Evan’s been prescribed three different drugs, and they’re all sitting untouched on the top shelf of the medicine cabinet. John’s not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing; on the one hand, Evan clearly has PTSD and should probably be doing what his doctors say, but, on the other, John’s heard plenty of horror stories about vets being overmedicated. “Sorry,” he says, pouring himself a mug of the coffee Evan apparently already brewed.

Evan snorts derisively. “You ain’t,” he says. 

“Okay, fine, not really,” John says. “You drawing again?” he asks, gesturing at the notepad open in front of Evan to a sketch of an M-4.

“Apparently art is therapeutic,” Evan says. “Didn’t think they could possibly make counseling any gayer than it already was, but leave it the VA to find a way.”

John grabs the Inappropriate Language Jar from its place on the counter and shakes it expectantly in front of Evan’s face.

“What? I didn’t say faggot!” Evan exclaims, put upon.

“Unless you’re drawing some pretty risqué drawings in your art therapy, I doubt it qualifies as gay. And your unrepentant homophobia isn’t helping either one of us,” John says.

Rolling his eyes, Evan goes to reclaim his wallet from the little table just inside the front door. He’s already dressed in his PT gear, probably waiting until it’s time to wake Mac. He returns with a dollar bill and adds it to the jar with a provocative flourish. 

“Thank you,” John says. “The queer community appreciates your support.”

“Man,” Evan says, collapsing back into his chair and beginning a doodle of a hand grenade, “why you gotta make a thing of it like that?”

“Pretty sure you’re the one who makes it into a thing, Q-tip,” John says. “I never thought it was that big a deal.”

Evan flexes his jaw muscles and keeps shading in his drawing darker and darker. Evidently John’s strayed danger close to topics best not discussed. He considers pushing the issue, but he doesn’t really know what he’d say in the unlikely event that Evan managed to nut up and talk about their shit. He opts instead to change the subject. “I’m going for a hike with some friends in Maramec State Park. You’re welcome to come with.”

“No thanks, man. I’ve got Darius most of the day. Trying to pay back the Lafayettes for watching Mac so much.”

“Sure,” John says. He’s hardly surprised by this response. Evan has persistently deflected all of John’s attempts to include him in social activities since his arrival. John’s not sure if it’s just about Evan being indiscriminately antisocial at the moment or if it’s more specifically about Evan not wanting to engage with John’s civilian friends. 

“I’m gonna wake up Mac. You’re not running with us then?” Evan says.

“Nah, I’ll save my energy for the hike. I’ll be back before five so you can go do your bouncer thing.”

Evan nods and heads for the stairs. 

John waits until he’s sure he’s out of view before he starts flipping backwards through the notebook. Most of its contents are predictable, if deeply disturbing. Landscapes of what must be Afghanistan, where John never deployed. Weapons. Severed limbs. He nearly flips right by a picture of a marine laying in the wreckage of a humvee, obviously dead, before realizing with an icy jolt that the dead combatant is him. Not the John Christeson of ten years ago, either — it’s him as he appears now, beard and all. John’s not sure what to make of it, and he’s not eager for Evan to catch him snooping, so he carefully flips back to the page Evan was on before he went upstairs.

While Evan and Mac go for their run, John gets his shit together for this hike — he has to reclaim his day pack from the back of his car, pack water and food that travels well, since they’ll be gone through lunch, and do a great deal of last minute coordination via text message. By the time his plans have solidified, the outing is down to John and three other people, and they’re carpooling in Harry and Ashley’s car. (Harry is a good friend John met years ago through an SLMPD vs. St. Louis Fire Department touch football game — Harry, of course, was playing for the other side. Ashley is his fiancée.) This driving arrangement is good for gas costs and, presumably, the environment, but it poses some difficulties for John’s personal life. 

First of all, the chances of Harry and Ashley picking him up without getting out of the car seem slim, which means Evan is going to have to actually interact with adult humans other than John and his psychotherapy group. Evan is not going to be thrilled about this development, and John’s not sure he is either, though he can’t precisely articulate why. Perhaps it’s that his St. Louis friends know a different John than Evan knows — with everyone in the same room, which version of himself will he be?

Second, they will likely have already picked up Andre, the third member of this excursion, and John definitely doesn’t want Andre in the same room as Evan. It’s not like he expects Andre to walk in and announce, “Hey, John foolishly slept with me once two years ago before Ash and I became actually really good work friends, and then he hastily backpedaled when he realized he’d have to see me a lot.” Andre’s engaged, for fuck’s sake. He’s long stopped caring about that particular assignation. But, well, Andre advertises his sexuality slightly more loudly than John does; there’s no way Evan won’t guess that he’s gay, and, because Evan is Evan, he might just assume they have history. Which is completely unfair and ridiculous but, unfortunately, in this case, also very true.

John gets all his shit organized and out on the front porch in the optimistic hope that he can maybe rush into the car and avoid the whole debacle. By the time Evan and Mac are back from their run, John’s starting on breakfast. Evan heads for the shower, and Mac comes to help him. She’s gotten very good at cracking eggs singlehanded, and Evan spots her doing just that when he comes downstairs. Mac, as usual, leaves the eggs for John to finish and scampers off to shower.

Evan’s barefoot, in his usual baggy jeans and white t-shirt. He’s still a bit damp from the shower, which is making parts of the shirt stick to his chest, and John forces himself not to stare. John stayed in remarkably good shape after leaving the Corps, but he’s more a runner and hiker than a martial artist. Evan, on the other hand, has visibly maintained the muscle mass in his torso and arms. They used to be a fairly even match for strength in hand-to-hand and in… other situations, but John very much doubts that’s the case anymore. And the dampness of the white t-shirt allows a darker color to show through over Evan’s left pectoral muscle: likely a tattoo, but certainly not one he had the last time John saw his bare chest. He fervently hopes it doesn’t fucking say “Tiffany.” Evan still wears his dog tags. They’re tucked into his t-shirt, but John remembers what they say. Evan’s blood type is AB negative. His gas mask size is large. His religion is “No preference,” though he often joked about having it officially changed to “Jedi.” John even still remembers his social security number.

“You are such an asshole,” Evan says the very second he hears Mac slam the bathroom door upstairs.

John considers waving the Inappropriate Language Jar in his face again, but opts to retaliate instead. “What the fuck did I do?”

“There is a trick to the egg thing! You taught her just to piss me off!”

“Maybe she’s just naturally a better cook than you, fucknuts.”

Evan punches him in the upper arm. 

“Watch it, you’re going to make me spill this!” John admonishes, but he notes that the blow is far, far gentler than Evan would have hit him ten years ago, even in jest. Since Evan came to stay, they’ve hardly touched each other at all, except for a few accidental brushes in tight spaces. 

Maya Lafayette turns up on the front porch before Harry and Ashley, with her brother in tow. Evan is still doing the breakfast dishes — he’s been insisting on that lately, since John does the cooking. “Thanks for dropping him off, Maya!” Evan calls over the noise of the sink.

“Are you kidding?” Maya says. “I _volunteered._ My dance squad is coming over for practice this morning and I do not want him there for that.”

“No one wants to hang out with your stupid dance squad,” Darius says. He’s sprawled on the floor already, letting Tupac slobber all over his face. 

“Feel free to keep him all day. Or for the rest of his life,” Maya says. John isn’t a sneaker expert, but he’s pretty sure the shoes she’s wearing are retro Air Jordans, which are the shoes Mac’s been begging Evan to buy her as her reward for organizing the bookshelf. Evan’s been holding off because he says they’re too expensive for kids’ shoes. John wonders how long they have before Mac finds a dance squad to join. 

Not long after Maya’s departed and Mac and Darius have retreated to the basement to play ping pong, John hears the sound of a car engine cutting out and doors slamming out front. 

“See you around four, Q-tip!” he says hastily to Evan, who’s drying the non-stick pan with a dish towel Sarah gave him that says _Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will sit in a boat and drink all day._ (It was meant as a dig at him and Harry, coincidentally.) Then he awkwardly rushes out the door to see that, of course, Ashley, Harry, and Andre are all climbing the steps to his front porch.

“Where’s the fire?” Harry says, laughing. 

“What? Nowhere. We should get going,” John says. 

“Are you kidding?” Ashley says. “Harry says you finished the downstairs! This place has been a construction zone for over a year!”

“Yeah, we had bets on if you would ever finish it,” Andre says.

John suddenly, intensely regrets bragging to Harry about this via texted pictures two weeks ago, but clearly keeping them out is going to cause more of a kerfuffle than just letting them in, so John just sighs and opens the door with a flourish. 

Evan immediately wheels about, his hand tensing near his right hip, where John knows he still keeps his KA-BAR, though it’s currently concealed beneath the length of his t-shirt.

“Wow!” Ashley exclaims, rushing over to the mantel to run her hands along it. “This looks so great, John!”

“I miss the electric saw, personally,” Andre says. 

Harry laughs. 

“This is my friend Evan who’s, uh, been staying with me,” John says, gesturing towards the kitchen.

“Oh!” Ashley says in obvious shock. “We’ve actually already met.”

“Come again?” John says, flabbergasted.

“Uh, Miss Williams is Mac’s teacher,” Evan says. 

“Please, call me Ashley!” she says, crossing the room to shake his hand. “Um, this is my fiancée, Harry.” Harry steps forward to shake Evan’s hand as well. 

“Boy,” says Evan. “The kids are going to be very disappointed that you’re not madly in love with the other fourth grade teacher.”

“That would be me! Andre, nice to meet you,” Andre says, stepping forward for a handshake.

“Seriously?” John says, amused despite the bizarre situation. “They think you two are a thing?”

“I know, right?” Andre says. “They’re comically off base with that one. Sometimes we like to deliberately stir up their little gossip mill for our own amusement.”

“John, why did you not tell me Mackenzie was living with you?” Ashley rounds on him. 

“I had no idea you were her teacher!” John protests.

“Seriously?” she says. “How dense are you? _Look at your own refrigerator._ ” John’s fridge has indeed become covered in notices from Mac’s school; he can’t even see his own photographs anymore. “‘Miss Williams’s Class: November Calendar,” she reads. “Miss Williams’s Class Field Trip Notice. Miss Williams’s _and Mr. Jackson’s_ Fourth Grade Thanksgiving Feast.”

“To be fair, Ash, Williams and Jackson are extremely common names,” Andre says generously.

“Please don’t send macaroni and cheese to that feast, by the way,” Ashley says earnestly to Evan. “Last year it was _wall to wall_ macaroni and not a vegetable in sight. Or, at least, not a vegetable in sight that wasn’t smothered in marshmallows or baked into a pie.”

“Take it up with the chef over there,” Evan says, gesturing at John from across the room. “Apparently I’m not even good enough to crack eggs.”

Ashley throws John a quizzical look, and he can see the question brewing in her mind: Are you two… together? Innocent enough, easy enough to say no, but once upon a time it would have also been enough to send Evan into hostile panic mode at John’s expense for months.

John is saved from this fate by, of all people, Darius, who chooses that moment to emerge from the basement saying, “Yo, Sergeant Stafford, can we have — OH MY GOD. MAC, WHAT DID YOU DO? THERE ARE TWO TEACHERS IN YOUR HOUSE.”

“WHAT?” John can hear Mac shriek from all the way downstairs, followed by her footsteps thundering up the stairs. 

“No one’s in trouble,” Ashley assures her when she emerges into the kitchen. “We’re just picking up John for a hike.”

“You’re friends with our teacher?” Mac says; she looks like she’s trying to decide whether to be horrified or impressed. 

“There are no laws against it. I checked,” John says. 

Darius is openly gawking at the sight of Ashley and Andre standing next to each other in casual hiking clothes in Mac’s living room. Because Andre is Andre, he decides to rub it in by putting his arm around Ashley’s shoulders. Harry inexpertly conceals laughter behind a cough, but the kids aren’t paying attention to him anyway. “We should probably get going, though,” Andre says. “See you kids on Monday. Evan, nice to meet you!”

Evan acknowledges Andre with a stiff nod. It looks to John like his teeth are clenched; perhaps not adequately distracted from Andre by the commotion with the kids, then. 

Harry’s driving, and Ashley and Andre pile into the back seat of the car unprompted, so John gets the front passenger seat by default, though he thinks this is less out of consideration for him and more a result of Ashley and Andre’s mutual desire to exchange pointed looks in response to this new revelation about his personal life. 

Predictably, it’s Ashley who breaks the ice just moments after Harry puts the car into gear. “So… anything you want to share with the class there, buddy?” she says.

“I told you guys I had a friend staying for a bit,” John says defensively.

“Correction,” says Andre. “You told Harry, who told Ashley, who told me, but go on.”

“Also,” says Ashley, “when you told Harry you had a friend staying for a while, I don’t think it occurred to any of us that what you somehow meant was that you had a friend _and his daughter_ living with you indefinitely.”

“I don’t know that _indefinitely_ is the word for it,” John mumbles, grateful that he can at least look out the windshield and not at Ashley’s face.

“Well Mackenzie sure seems to think it’s indefinite,” Ashley says, which makes John feel shitty. 

“You should probably call her Mac. She’s used to only hearing her full name when she’s in trouble.” John mostly says it in retaliation, and when he realizes that, it makes him feel even shittier.

“Wait,” Andre says to Ashley. “Is this the kid you were talking to me about, the one you thought was traumatized or something? And the dad seemed off when you talked to him?”

“Yeah, same kid,” Ashley answers him.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake!” John says. “She’s not traumatized! Of course she has some issues after a childhood of her single parent being constantly deployed to war zones, but he’s out now, and he’s doing his counseling, and I have this under control, so step off! You’re not combat veterans. You _don’t get it.”_ John doesn’t realize how loud he’s being until his outburst is greeted with a solid minute or two of ringing silence. 

Harry breaks the silence by saying loudly, “I’m not getting involved in this, but I can’t believe you’re living with a kid, John. You hate kids.”

John rolls his eyes, annoyed at the accusation but grateful Harry’s steered the conversation into safer waters. “I don’t _hate_ them,” he says.

“You’ve explicitly told me on several occasions, ‘Kids ruin everything,’” Harry says. “That’s a direct quote.”

“Yeah, yeah, whatever, fine. I will eat some crow. Mac’s okay.”

In the rear view mirror, Ashley and Andre are exchanging looks.

It comes as no very great surprise to John that his friends cut him a wide berth on their hike. Luckily, Harry suggests the most challenging trail, so for large swaths of terrain no one’s speaking much. When they stop for breaks, for views, and for lunch, he mostly lets Ashley and Andre carry the conversation. Although it makes him feel like a dick, pulling the veteran card does seem to have shamed them into a temporary silence on the subject of Evan and Mac, which is sort of a relief, but also sort of not: if Ashley really has noticed something’s up with Mac in a crowded classroom (one that includes Darius Lafayette, moreover), something’s probably up with Mac.

And John’s involved now, which is exactly what he claimed he wouldn’t be when Sarah called him on this two months ago. “Why the hell did you even say yes when he asked to visit?” she had half-yelled over the phone, which had of course sent Jasper off on a crying jag. “What the hell do you think you’re going to gain from this?” 

“I don’t fucking know!” John had yelled back at her. It hadn’t been a lie at the time, but it wasn’t exactly the truth, either. He knows now: as much as he wanted to punish Evan for everything that happened before, he wanted to see him again so much more. 

John’s exhausted when he finally pulls up outside the house, probably as much from avoiding Ashley and Andre in close proximity as from the actual hike. Ashley follows him out of the car, because of course she’s switching to the passenger seat. Although she’s standing right next to him on the curb, she gives him the smallest of awkward waves, as though she’s not sure what it’s okay to say to him. 

John starts up towards the house, but then he turns abruptly before she can open the front door again. “Look,” he says. “We served together in Iraq. Three tours. Then I got the hell out and he stayed in. And I don’t know what happened after that, but I do know he’s a great father and he’s really trying.”

“I wasn’t trying to say that he wasn’t, John,” she says. 

“Yeah, okay. I’ll see you soon, I guess,” he says. 

No one in their right mind would ever think Evan was anything less than a wonderful father. No one would ever think he was anything less than an exceptional Marine. He was given the Silver Star after Fallujah, for fuck’s sake. It’s really only John who’s had a front row view of his worst personal failings. John and probably Tiffany, wherever the hell she is. Maybe that should earn her some sympathy from him, but he can’t seem to muster it up. Unlike her daughter, Tiffany never truly became real to him: all he feels for her is resentment.

He’s sort of in the mood to flop on the couch and be lazy and brooding for the rest of the night, so he’s kind of hoping that Darius has already gone home, but it turns out he’s shit out of luck.

“He’s here! He’s here!” Darius shouts the moment John opens the door. 

“Yes, I’m here, calm down,” he says. The dogs obviously join in the chorus of noise, but John doesn’t get a chance to check on them, because Mac materializes and grabs his hand.

“Come on, we have to show you something upstairs!” she yells, and she and Darius begin roughly towing him up the staircase.

“Guys, I need to take off my hiking boots,” he says. “They’re covered in mud.”

“Do it later!” Darius says.

“We need to show you now!” Mac says. At the top of the stairs she demands, “Close your eyes!”

“I’ve got ‘em, I’ll cover ‘em,” Darius says, and he attempts to stick his hands in front of John’s eyes, but of course he isn’t tall enough. 

“Darius, calm down, you’re going to poke him in the face,” Evan says — John didn’t even notice him climbing the stairs behind him. “I got it.” And, with no further warning, Evan’s warm, rough hands are covering his eyes, pulling his head back and his back flush against Evan’s chest. For a moment, he’s reeling with the familiarity of Evan’s body against his own, and then Mac is saying, “I’ve got the door!”

He hears her open the door to his bedroom, and the smell sort of gives the surprise away, but he still lets Evan guide him down the hall and through the doorway, his warmth radiating through the back of John’s fleece pullover. He’s still a bit shocked by the sensation when Evan does lift his hands and step back. 

“Ta dah!” Darius yells.

“We painted your room!” Mac says unnecessarily. 

“You sure did,” John agrees. The formerly beige-interrupted-by-white-putty walls are now a deep blue that sort of reminds John of his childhood room at his parents’ house in Lebanon. 

“We did this, too!” Darius says, throwing open the closet to reveal that the Ikea shelving unit has been assembled and filled. “We used your power tools!”

“Don’t worry, they didn’t break anything,” Evan says. 

“And we did that, too!” Mac says, gesturing at the little tables on either side of the bed, which are covered in little framed pictures that weren’t there before. “So you can see your pictures because my stuff is all over the fridge now.”

“You really did not have to do all this,” John mutters to Evan under his breath. 

Evan shrugs. “Darius is easier to handle when he’s busy,” he says.

John walks over to the table on the side of the bed where he sleeps and sees that next to the photo of him, Sarah, and Jasper and the one of Bravo-2 in Iraq, Mac has framed her ‘counselor picture’ of the three of them and the dogs standing outside the house. 

“Well?” Mac says. “What do you think?”

John shrugs. “It’s screwby,” he says. 

Mac and Darius both look very confused, but John hasn’t heard Evan laugh like that in the entire time he’s been in St. Louis.


	9. Part II: Chapter Three

John wakes after four on Sunday morning with a sudden, distinct notion that someone is looking at him. When he sits up in bed, it takes a moment to reorient himself to his room: the shadow of the chair in the corner is different now that it no longer holds a mountain of folded clothes, and his walls are darker. The room is cold because he left the windows open wider than usual to air out the last of the paint smell. But his door is exactly how he left it: very slightly ajar. 

When he climbs out of bed and walks out to the hallway, he isn’t surprised to see Evan standing outside Mac’s open door in the black jacket and t-shirt he’s been wearing to his bouncer gig. “What’re you doing here?” he says, voice scratchy from sleep.

“Sorry to wake you, man,” Evan whispers. “Was just checkin’ on Mac.”

John is suddenly very, very certain that Evan checked on him as well. He wonders if this is the first time or if it’s habit; John’s not as wary a sleeper as he was in his Force Recon days. Emboldened perhaps by the fact that he’s only half awake, he says, “No, Evan. I mean, what are you doing here? In St. Louis, with me?”

Evan is quiet for a moment that seems long, though it’s likely less than a minute. “Not sure,” he says.

“Well,” John says,“why don’t you let me know when you figure it out.” 

Then he turns back to his room, but Evan stops him by saying, “John.” It might be the first time Evan’s called him by his first name in the time he’s been in St. Louis. John turns to look at him, or at the dim shape of him in the darkness of the hall. “I was wiggin’ out when I got back from my last deployment. Maybe since a long time before that.”

“I think we’ve established that fact,” John says.

“I just…” Evan scrubs a hand across his face in frustration. “I just needed to get her somewhere safe.”

“And you thought of the St. Louis metropolitan area?” John says sarcastically.

“No, asshole,” Evan says. “I thought of you.”

“But you wouldn’t have nutted up and made the call,” John says, “if it was just you.”

“Maybe not,” Evan says. “I really don’t know. I can’t remember anymore what I was like when it was just me.”

“Yeah, well,” John says. “I remember pretty well.” Then he goes back to bed. This time he shuts the door all the way.

He’s sure in the morning (the real morning) that he didn’t dream the conversation because Evan’s back to avoiding conversation with him. Wonderful. As usual, he and the dogs beat Evan and Mac back to the house after PT. Once he’s showered he puts on a suit — his nice one — and a tie. When Mac sees this, she asks, “Court again?” sounding concerned.

“Not on a Sunday,” John says. “I have a Christening to go to. I’m going to be my nephew’s godfather.”

“But you’re already _my_ godfather,” Mac objects. 

“Mac,” Evan says from the kitchen, where he’s drinking a glass of water, “there’s no limit to how many times you can be a godparent.”

“Well, there _should_ be,” Mac grumbles.

“I agree with Mac,” John says. “After this I’m tapped.”

“Are you going to buy your nephew lots of books, too?” Mac asks.

“Probably,” John says. “But unless my sister stops sticking her nose into my life, I’m also going to buy him super loud toys that will annoy the crap out of her.” 

Evan doesn’t laugh.

“Are we making breakfast?” Mac asks. 

“Sorry, kiddo, I gotta go now,” John says. “I’m having breakfast with my family after the service.”

“Oh,” Mac says, deflated.

“It won’t kill you to have cereal for one day, Mac,” Evan says. John doesn’t think that’s what she’s upset about. Ash is right: she’s already grown accustomed to John filling a certain role in her daily routine. If he isn’t going to make a permanent habit of it, he’s going to have to rip the band-aid off soon, before he does any more damage.

Now that she’s put the memory in his head, though, on the car ride to the church and during the ceremony he can’t stop thinking about when he was last asked to be a godfather. At the time, he’d been absolutely furious and had wanted to tell Evan to go fuck himself and leave John the hell out of his fucked up sham of a family. He couldn’t, of course, because Evan had been either canny enough or clueless enough to ask him during work hours, in the presence of Walt Hasser and Gabe Garza, so John was forced to either agree or clue them in on just how bad things were between the two of them.

Jasper’s baptism is different from Mac’s. For a start, it’s in the same Catholic church in Lebanon where John had his own baptism, First Communion, and Confirmation, where he attended mass and CCD and Children’s Choir when he was growing up. The rhythms of the service, if not the exact words, are deeply familiar to him. His extended family and a few old friends of Sarah’s fill the first two pews. He knows the priest by name.

Mac’s baptism was at a non-denominational chapel on the base. He’d never met the minister — a military chaplain — before, and the service seemed strange to him. Tiffany had been wearing a dress that John’s mother would not have allowed Sarah to wear inside a church. Neither Evan’s nor Tiffany’s parents were in attendance; John had gotten the impression that her family was just as dysfunctional as Evan’s. Now that he thinks on it, he’s pretty sure she was only nineteen at the time. Evan had barely turned twenty-two. The first rows of seats, though, were filled with their Force Recon brothers and their families.

After Jasper’s service and the subsequent morning Mass, the Christesons (and the Wellers — Sarah’s husband’s family) drive back to John’s parents’ house for breakfast. As is her custom for post-church morning gatherings, John’s mom has already prepared a baked egg casserole and a bunch of Pilsbury crescent rolls that she throws in the oven while his dad makes the coffee. John gets the fruit salad and grapefruit juice out of the fridge while everyone else coos over how precious Jasper looks in the white gown he’s only going to wear the once. 

(“Make sure you save it, dear, in case you have another baby,” Mom says. “Or in case someone else in the family does.”

“Mother, do not start,” John says.)

After Mac’s service, John and the others all went back to Evan and Tiffany’s new house, a split level in a neighborhood mostly for E-5’s. (Evan had recently made Sergeant.) It was closer to lunch time, and Evan had grilled sausages and burgers in the backyard on a grill John was pretty sure he borrowed from his neighbor. Lilley and Leon had stopped for a bunch of beer that they threw in a cooler with ice. Mac was fussy and unpleasant; she was baptized earlier than Jasper and she’d been born premature and underweight, a C-section baby. John remembers excusing himself to use the bathroom and wandering around the house, not snooping, exactly, but observing the objects in plain view. The shower curtain had a flower pattern on it. Tiffany had a bunch of makeup left out on her side of the dresser; Evan’s side was bare. The walls were the standard Housing Office beige, but Tiffany had obviously tried to cheer them up by hanging up some of that cheap art you see at discount home goods stores. The rack for the keys and mail had little birds on it. John remembers one of those cutesy signs in the living room that said “In this family we…” and a bunch of dumb shit they clearly didn’t wind up doing in their family. He remembers being furious because Evan _hated_ cheesy shit like that and John knew it and Tiffany clearly didn’t.

At the time, he’d thought Evan asking him to be Mac’s godfather was all about the two of them, about Evan wanting to gloss over his own profound assholery and force their relationship into some bullshit mold of acceptable male friendship. Now, though, after last night, after the last month and a half, he’s not so sure. Evan changed when Mac was born. Hell, Evan changed before that — when he found out she was going to be born, pretty much. Maybe it was always, even way back then, about Evan wanting Mac to have something he thinks he can’t give her, something he thinks that somehow John can. Evan’s always been a twisted, self-loathing motherfucker. In his own way, it’s sweet. Flattering. Noble, even. 

But if that’s all Evan wants from him, it’s not going to be enough for John. Maybe Sarah’s been right this whole time and John should have stayed the hell away from Evan and let him fix his shit alone. 

John puts in a good forty-five minutes of polite small talk with the relatives and guests to make sure he’s in his mother’s good graces before he can’t take it anymore and flees to the second floor. His bedroom has hardly changed at all since he was a teenager — the only alteration has been the contents of his desk. His father put a new desktop computer and new office supplies in it a few years ago so that he could occasionally work at home. John repeatedly assured them that he wasn’t particularly attached to it and they should feel free to turn it into an office, but they’d already spent some money turning Sarah’s old bedroom into a proper guest room with a queen bed when she and Miles, her now-husband, started dating seriously. At least, that was the reason they gave him; maybe his mother is still just attached to this shrine to John’s childhood, his identity before he was a Marine, a veteran, a cop — a bunch of shit that worries her, basically. 

Now she’s saying that they may as well leave the bunk beds so Jasper can have sleepovers here when he’s older.

John runs his fingers along the contents of his bookshelf — sports trophies, Star Wars Legos, books, and CDs — until they alight on his old dog tags. He knows plenty of guys who kept wearing theirs for years after being discharged, but that was never a thing for John. He hasn’t picked them up in years. They still have their rubber silencers on.

CHRISTESON  
JOHN D O NEG  
496 88 5234  
USMC M  
ROMAN CATHOLIC

John pockets them and moves on to his Kevlar from OIF. He pulls it down and turns it around to the side that says “CHRISTESON” in Evan’s graffiti block letters, the same ones he used to write Mac’s name on all her school books. It looks exactly as he remembers it. He’s not sure what he was expecting. 

John can’t imagine being in love with anyone other than Evan, but, if he’s honest with himself, he’s never tried particularly hard at it.

Someone knocks on the open door and John turns, helmet still in hand. Sarah steps through the doorway. “The room that time forgot,” she says. 

“Tell me about it,” John agrees. “I told Mom she could do what she wanted with it, but apparently she wants to preserve the nineties.”

“That’s because she thinks you walk on water,” Sarah says.

“I don’t know,” John says. “I think your tiny human might have replaced me in her affections.”

“Very possible,” Sarah says. “She’s downstairs spoiling him right now.” She gestures at the lettering on John’s Kevlar. “Evan did that, didn’t he?”

“Yeah,” John confirms. “At Matilda. The camp we were stationed at in Kuwait before Bush declared war on Saddam. It sounds crazy now, but at the time we were all kind of hoping for a war. Like we thought it would be a fun challenge or something.” John did his own stint at the VA post-discharge, more because he thought it would be a good preventative measure than because he was, as Evan put it, ‘wigging out,’ so he’s learned to talk about Iraq, but he’s never gotten comfortable doing so with civilians, not even his family.

“Are you going to jump down my throat again if I ask you about him?” Sarah says.

“Would that stop you?” 

“Do you still love him?”

“Yes,” John says instantly. Funny — he’s lived with that truth for all of his adult life, but he’s never said it aloud before. He supposes he’s never had the opportunity; Evan wouldn’t give him an opening like that.

“Does he love you?” Sarah asks.

It’s on the tip of John’s tongue to say he doesn’t know, but he stops himself when he realizes that, in fact, he does. “Yeah,” he says. “He loves me. But that might not be enough.”

“What do you mean?” Sarah asks quietly.

“I can’t fix what’s wrong with him,” John says. “If it were just me, I wouldn’t mind waiting around for him to figure it out himself, even if it took years. But Mac doesn’t have that kind of time, and I refuse to set her up to be totally screwed if we can’t work our shit out.”

“I’m sorry, John,” Sarah says.

John shrugs. “You can’t realistically snowplow all the problems in my life out of my way, Sarah,” he says.

“Yeah, I figured out the hard way when you joined the Marines,” Sarah says. “I can keep trying, though.”

John snorts out a half laugh. 

“You should probably get back downstairs before Jasper completely turns Mom against you,” she says, and she stands up on tiptoes to plant a kiss on his cheek which gets mostly lost in his beard.

&

John winds up staying at his parents’ until well into the evening, first helping his mother clean up and then ditching his suit to help his dad rake leaves and fix the sink in the upstairs hall bathroom. He needs a minute before he can handle going home, despite his phone being inundated with chirpy text messages from various members of his rec league baseball team. They play Sunday afternoons in Forest Park and John easily could have made today’s games if he left the Christening on time, but he’s not in the mood to deal with other people — especially not Ashley and Andre, especially not if they’ve coordinated a strategy for interrogating him about Evan — so he’s more than happy to use Jasper as an excuse to bow out.

It’s nearly nine by the time he gets back to his house, and when he goes upstairs to hang up his suit in the garment bag his dad loaned him, Evan is already herding Mac into bed. Mac gives him a hug when John passes them in the hall. “Night, John!” she says. 

John places the suit in his newly organized closet and drops his dog tags on his bedside table. He’s not even sure why he brought them home with him. Perhaps because he feels oddly like he’s marching back into battle.

Back downstairs, John grabs a beer from the fridge. There’s now a 6-pack of Heinekens next to John’s own stash of 4 Hands; Evan must have bought them for himself to avoid drinking John’s pricier beer — either that or he just thinks craft beer is for faggots. John briefly considers excavating his bottle of Jack from the high cabinet where he hid it to keep it out of Mac’s reach, but getting drunk with Evan has historically led to poor decision-making on John’s part. 

Once he’s popped the cap, he collapses onto the couch, still stewing. It’s one his parents gave him for free years ago when they replaced some of their old living room furniture. John remembers with a jolt that he and Evan once fell asleep together entwined on this very couch. It was the first time he visited John in Lebanon, and they’d been watching a movie before they passed out — one of the Star Wars films, John thinks. It was probably just a day or two before the first time Evan drunkenly kissed him, though for months afterward John was convinced he made the whole thing up, until Evan did it again. Drunk again, of course. John still isn’t sure why Evan always needed alcohol to sleep with him: was it necessary to loosen his considerable inhibitions, or was it just to give himself a flimsy excuse for the transgression later? For more than a year after Evan knocked up and then hastily married Tiffany, John was half-convinced he’d invented their whole illicit affair, or at least misinterpreted its emotional weight. He thinks he hates Evan for that more than for anything else, for making him question his own mind. Whatever their relationship meant or didn’t mean to Evan, it’s John’s personal ground zero: the heartbreak against which he will forever measure all others.

Some of what he’s thinking must be showing on his face, because when Evan comes down the stairs and sees him sitting there, he says, “You want to talk about shit now, don’t you.”

“Talk about what shit?” John says.

“The shit that happened with us.”

“We had sex, Evan,” John says bluntly. “That’s what happened with us.”

“You wanna _lower your voice?”_ Evan hisses angrily. “She is not asleep!”

“No, I do not particularly want to lower my voice,” John says.

Evan grabs him by the arm and hauls him off the couch and to the doorway that leads to the basement stairs; John was right about them no longer being an even match for strength. “Get the fuck off me,” he says, yanking his arm away. Evan does let go, but John opens the basement door and descends the stairs anyway, flicking the unenclosed light switch as he goes. He can hear Evan slamming the door behind them. 

“For fuck’s sake, Christeson!” Evan says angrily. “I don’t want Mac to hear about all that shit!”

“You don’t want anyone to hear about it! You don’t want to hear about it yourself! You never let me talk about it back then, and even now you can’t handle the slightest allusion to my sexuality without having a meltdown. You wish I’d just forget that whole chapter of our relationship ever happened and go right back to being good ol’ Corps buddies. Well, guess what, Evan? I haven’t fucking forgotten!”

“I _don’t_ want you to forget!” Evan yells back. “ _I_ haven’t fucking forgotten!”

John is momentarily stymied by this response; he’s not sure what he was expecting Evan to say, but it certainly wasn’t that. “What the fuck _do_ you want, then?”

“I don’t —” Evan starts, but he cuts himself off. “I just — I know this shit is all my fault. I’m the one who started it and I’m the one who fucked it all up. I just wanted to at least try fixin’ it.” 

John exhales when he realizes he’s been holding his breath.

“I’m sorry, John,” Evan says.

“Sorry for starting it? Or sorry for fucking it up?”

Evan takes a moment before he answers. “I’m not sorry I slept with Tiffany, because if I didn’t I wouldn’t have my daughter. And I’m not sorry for trying to make it work with her so I could be a real dad to Mac. But I am sorry I was messin’ around with women in the first place when we were… together. I didn’t even really want to. I guess I just felt like I had something to prove. And I’m sorry about how it all ended. I’m sorry you got hurt. I thought… I thought it’d be worse for me. I thought you’d be okay.”

“Well, I was okay, eventually,” John says. “But at the time it fucking sucked.” He feels oddly deflated and sinks down onto the couch, which Evan has not yet pulled out for the night. His fury at Evan has been brewing for more than a decade, but it’s difficult to hang onto when confronted with genuine regret. He looks down at his bare feet, which are cold on the concrete basement floor.

“I’m sorry,” Evan says. He sits down on the couch next John, but carefully leaves as much space as possible between them. “I loved you, you know.”

John turns his head so quickly he hurts his neck, but Evan is looking straight ahead, at the weights set up against the far wall. The muscles in his jaw are working in that familiar way they do when he’s uncomfortable. “I wasn’t sure I still would,” Evan says, still avoiding looking at John. “It’s been a really long time. Thought you mighta changed.” 

“My mom says people don’t change,” John says. “They only become more so.”

Evan laughs a little, glances at John briefly out of the corner of his eye. “That sounds like some shit Sarah would say.”

“I know,” John says. “She comes by it honestly, you know.”

Evan laughs again. “Well, turns out I do. Ya know. Love you.”

“Hey, Q-tip,” John says, pushing lightly at his shoulder until he turns his head again. “I love you too. I never stopped. I, uh, never tried very hard to.”

Evan’s staring at him like he can’t quite believe what he’s hearing, so it’s John who leans in, slowly closing the distance between them, to kiss him. For what feels like a long time, Evan remains still and unresponsive against his lips, but just when John is beginning to wonder if he’s somehow misread the situation, Evan grabs his shoulders and kisses back with such force that John is pushed back against the arm of the couch with Evan half on top of him. He remembers this about Evan: every time he gave in and kissed John, he was like a man dying of thirst, trying to make the most of his last drink of water before a long exile in the desert. 

John tries to break away — it’s difficult, as he’s now pressed firmly down into the couch cushions with Evan an immovable weight above him, but eventually he gets Evan’s attention by nipping his lip and yanking on the back of his flannel shirt. 

“What is it?” Evan says, nuzzling into John’s neck. 

“Not to object to your enthusiasm,” John says, “but you don’t need to give yourself a panic attack. I promise this isn’t going to be the last time we do this.”

Evan laughs a little into John’s neck, which sends goosebumps zipping out along the surface of John’s skin. He squirms into Evan’s warmth. “That a guarantee?” Evan asks.

“Scout’s honor,” John says. 

“Of course you were a fuckin’ boy scout,” Evan says, kissing the edge of John’s ear. 

“Made it all the way to Eagle Scouts,” John says with mock pride. “Had to build a chest.”

“Shut the fuck up and kiss me,” Evan demands, and John arches his head back to comply. He slides his hands up underneath Evan’s flannel and t-shirt — true to form, there’s about two inches of boxer exposed above the low-hanging waist of Evan’s jeans, and then miles of warm skin. Evan’s shoulders are broad, and John can feel the muscles in his back shifting as he moves his head closer to kiss down the column of John’s neck. 

When his downwards progress is stopped by the collar of John’s t-shirt, Evan grunts in frustration and hauls himself up to sit back on his heels, yanking at the hem of John’s shirt. John allows him to pull it over his head, to push him back down and mouth at the old scar on John’s stomach from where he took some shrapnel in their second tour. But when his hands start to purposefully fiddle with the waistband of John’s sweatpants, he grasps ineffectively at Evan’s still regulation-short hair and gasps, “Wait, wait, wait!”

“What?” Evan says, biting down on the dip inside of John’s hipbone, causing him to jerk involuntarily. 

“We can’t have sex here,” John gasps.

“The fuck not?” Evan asks, still mouthing along the exposed skin above John’s sweatpants.

“Because the only condom I have is in my wallet, upstairs, on my bedside table.” 

Evan groans into John’s stomach, and the vibrations go straight south, making an already urgent situation still more precarious.

“Dawg, you don’t have a secret stash in the basement or something?”

“No, Evan, I do not usually have sex in my basement on a lumpy couch.” John, in fact, has never had sex in this house, or in any of the other apartments he’s lived in over the years, aside from the one he shared with Evan. He hates the idea of not being able to get rid of his partners when they’re through, of having to sleep next to them and wake up next to them in the morning. He elects not to share this information with Evan, though; he’s not sure whether he’ll be reassured to hear that he’s the exception to the rule, or just blindly jealous of John’s other assignations.

“You’re the worst fuckin’ boy scout,” Evan mumbles into his other hip. With a final, sloppy bite to John’s stomach, Evan hauls himself off of John’s body and the couch. He then grabs John’s arm and pulls him up as well. Standing next to Evan on the cold concrete floor, John is acutely aware that he is barefoot and shirtless, clad only in his boxer briefs and sweatpants, while Evan is fully dressed in not one but two shirts, jeans, and — John realizes suddenly — his white sneakers. He hastily retrieves his shirt from the back of the couch where Evan threw it, but Evan snatches it out of his hands and tosses it onto the weightlifting setup. “No, no, no,” he says, grabbing John’s shoulders and steering him up the stairs. “We are not gettin’ dressed. We’re doin’ the opposite of that.” John rolls his eyes, though of course Evan, climbing the stairs behind him and periodically, clumsily kissing his back, can’t see it.

Once they’re through the basement door, they both take care to silence their footfalls completely; it’s almost like being on a strange indoor recon mission. Although Mac’s door is closed to discourage the dogs from re-conquering their former haunt, John takes particular care to be silent as he walks by. Once Evan closes John’s bedroom door behind them, John hisses, “I can’t believe we’re finally doing this somewhere other than a Camp Pendleton barracks and we still have to fucking be quiet.”

“That child needs to make friends with some damn girls so she can get invited to a slumber party,” Evan agrees, toeing off his loosely-tied sneakers and stepping forward to wrap his arms around John and kiss him. Evan is maybe two inches taller than him, and John has to tilt his head back a bit for him, a sensation he associates purely with Evan — he’s avoided picking up guys who are bigger than him in the years since the last time they did this. Evan goes for his waistband again, but John swats his hands away.

“Uneven distribution of clothing, motherfucker,” he objects.

Evan snorts out a quiet laugh, but he unbuttons enough of the front of his flannel to yank it and his t-shirt over his head. It’s dark in John’s room without the overheads on, but there’s enough ambient light filtering in through the blinds that John can make out Mackenzie written in elaborate gothic lettering above Evan’s left pectoral muscle. 

John half-laughs, half-groans. “You would get your daughter’s name tattooed over your heart, you whiskey tango motherfucker.”

Evan grins. “I guess it is kinda on-brand,” he whispers into John’s neck, kissing his pulse point.

“Just tell me you don’t have any fucking Bible quotes or incorrect Chinese characters anywhere.”

Evan laughs into his ear. “Nah, man, just the one you’ve already seen. Tattoos are expensive, dawg. Gotta pay for childcare and sports and apparently now Air Jordans that’ll be too small in a year.”

Evan and John both got ill-advised “Semper Fi” tattoos under the influence of a great deal of alcohol and peer pressure on a Bravo-2 Tijuana adventure in the summer of 2003. John’s is small, a least, and right on his wrist where it’s easily covered by his watch every day. Evan’s is larger, on his upper arm, right below where the sleeve of a t-shirt ends. After they sobered up and dragged themselves back to Oceanside, Evan embellished it by going to a real tattoo place with a drawing he’d done himself of the Force Recon winged skull with the paddle and knife — it’s moto as shit, but it’s at least very well-illustrated, and it covers virtually his entire right shoulder. 

Evan’s got John wrapped in a boa constrictor-tight hold, and he slowly walks him backwards until the bed hits the back of John’s calves and he’s overbalanced, falling back onto the mattress. Evan leans over him, wraps an arm around his waist and yanks him up toward the headboard until his head lands on a pillow, pressed down by Evan’s lips against his own. John just lets it happen, sloppily tangling their tongues together as he basks in the warm pressure of Evan’s muscular chest bearing down on his own. Evan’s managed to settle himself between John’s legs, and when John runs his fingertips gently up and down the column of his spine, he moans and arches. 

Evan breaks their kiss long enough to mumble, “Fuckin’ missed you, asshole,” into John’s neck.

“Jeez, how romantic,” John gasps as Evan nips at his earlobe. “How can I resist such poetry? Take me now, sailor.”

Evan pulls back, and even in the darkness his grin looks predatory. “If you say so,” he says. This time, when Evan goes for John’s waistband, John lets him yank his sweatpants and boxer briefs all the way off. He grunts half in pleasure, half in discomfort when his dick springs free of the confines of the fabric. Evan seems momentarily paralazyed, staring down at him hungrily. Then he leans in, and John can feel his warm, humid breath ghosting over his erection. Evan quells John’s involuntary squirming by pressing his hips firmly into the mattress with his hands, and then he leans in, his bottom lip just barely brushing the tip of John’s erection.

John cries out.

“Quiet, asshole,” Evan scolds, his breath zipping by John’s oversensitized flesh. 

“Evan, stop, you gotta stop,” John moans, not particularly quiet.

Evan groans and buries his face in the dip next to John’s hip, brushing a smooth, clean shaven cheek along the side of John’s dick in the process, eliciting another spasm and cry. “Why?” Evan asks John’s torso. 

“Man, I am _not_ going to last if you start that shit,” John says. “And I want you to fuck me.”

Evan makes a funny choked off noise. “Man, are you tryin’ to kill me?” he says.

“No, I’m trying to get laid. Like, desperately trying.”

With a final undignified squawk, Evan tears himself away from John’s midsection and sits back on his heels to undo his belt. John stretches his arm out and grabs his wallet from the bedside table by the tips of his fingers. He fishes frantically around inside until he manages to find and extract the plastic packet. Evan has managed to extricate himself from his pants and resettle, kneeling, between John’s legs. “This is the only one I have,” John cautions. “So if you rip it, I may actually murder you.”

“More than fair,” Evan agrees. “Do you have any, uh…” He gestures awkwardly.

“Drawer,” John tells him. When Evan leans over him to reach it, his dick brushes along John’s stomach and John bites back noises. 

“Hey,” he says, suddenly apprehensive once Evan’s successfully retrieved the lube. “Go slow, okay? It’s, uh, been a while.”

“Man,” says Evan, “you have _no idea.”_

&

Afterwards, once Evan’s retrieved his boxers from the floor and a wet washcloth from the bathroom for a hasty clean up, John finds himself twisted in an embrace that’s more akin to a strangle hold than a post-coital cuddle. Evan was always like that, after, back when they were younger; it was as if he was trying to prevent John from somehow escaping in the night. Stupid, really; John was never the one who wanted to escape.

“I forgot what a fucking pain in the ass you are after sex,” John mumbles into his pillow. “It’s like being aggressively spooned by the giant squid from _Harry Potter._ Where do all these arms even come from?”

“First of all,” Evan says into the back of John’s head, “you didn’t forget. Second, do not talk about kids’ books when we’re naked in bed together. It’s fuckin’ creepy. And third, what the fuck do you care? You’re gonna fall asleep in under ten minutes anyway. You always pass right out after sex.”

“Do not,” John mumbles, though he is, honestly, starting to drift. He remembers this, too, from sex with Evan; the comfortable slide into immediate slumber. It’s oh so different from his newer routine of anxiously wondering how long he has to lie in bed beside his partner before he can escape to his own home without seeming like a complete asshole.

“Do so,” Evan argues. “Hand me your supercomputer and I’ll time you.”

“Get it yourself, asshole. Set my alarm while you’re at it. Got work tomorrow.”

Evan reaches out with an arm that’s already wrapped around John’s chest and retrieves the phone from the bedside table, even though John is technically closer. John notes through the fog of impending slumber that he doesn’t need to ask the passcode.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just the epilogue to go now, folks.


	10. Epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Evan talks to his daughter.

The Wednesday afternoon before Thanksgiving, Evan has to take Mac with him to the VA. He’d just as soon use her day off school as an excuse to cancel his counseling session, but John, unfortunately, is all over Evan’s ass about this gay PTSD shit and now possesses near-infinite leverage. That’s the problem with getting something you want: it becomes something you can lose. 

Evan has two people to lose now. John is the second. Mac, of course, will always be the first. Evan hates leaving her in the lobby of the VA during his session, but Erica, his counselor, is cool about letting him run out to check on her a few times. (Apparently leaving her outside the room where he can’t get a visual on her is an “exposure” to a source of his anxiety or something.) 

She’s supposed to be doing her timed reading, but she spends most of the forty-five minutes talking to the Vietnam vet handing out crap with that damn Veterans Crisis Line number. Evan’s pretty sure he was here the last time he brought Mac with him to the VA, when she got that stupid ball she and Darius wound up tossing around their classroom during a reading lesson. 

“That’s a smart young lady you’ve got there,” Vietnam guy says when Evan approaches his plastic table to collect Mac. 

“When she uses her head,” Evan agrees, smoothing down a few hairs at the back of Mac’s head that have gotten tangled.

“Bye, Gary!” Mac says with a wave.

“Bye, now,” Vietnam guy — Gary, apparently — says. “Best of luck to you both.”

Evan herds Mac outside into the cold. The temperature has dropped steadily over the last few weeks and the parking lot is still damp from an early morning rain. Evan, having spent most of his life in Florida and Southern California, is unaccustomed to it and finds himself wearing a comical amount of snivel gear every day. John enjoys mocking him for it, but John’s also essentially a human space heater, so at least Evan’s been warm at night. 

He unlocks the truck from the passenger side first, helps Mac climb in, and watches her buckle her seatbelt. When he walks around the cab and settles into the driver’s seat, Mac is fiddling with the zipper of her coat.

“What’s on your mind, Skipper?” Evan asks.

Mac shrugs and says nothing, but when Evan raises the keys to the ignition she says quietly, “Do you talk in your counseling?”

“Talkin’ is kinda the point, Skipper,” Evan says.

“But do you tell the truth, though?” Mac presses. “I don’t think counseling works unless you tell the truth.”

Evan lowers the keys and turns to look at her. “Why wouldn’t I?”

Mac avoids his eyes and shrugs again. “You don’t always tell the truth,” she mumbles.

“When have I ever lied to you?” Evan says more loudly.

“You don’t _lie_ exactly,” Mac says, turning her head to face him at last. “But you leave out the most important part of the story a lot. That’s kind of the same thing, Dad.”

This accusation briefly shocks Evan into silence. “When have I ever done that?” he says when he’s recovered.

“When we went to Corporal Cruz’s funeral. You didn’t tell me he killed himself. And you didn’t tell me he wasn’t the only one of your friends that did that.”

Evan scrubs his hand uncomfortably over his face and the top of his head. His hair has started to grow beyond the regulation limits of a high-and-tight. He hasn’t decided yet whether to buzz it back. “Mac, that’s not really stuff that a kid needs to worry about.”

“I’m almost ten!” Mac says angrily. “I’m not a baby, I’m not stupid, and I do need to worry about it because I don’t want you to do the same thing.”

Evan feels as though his intestines have been plunged into an ice bath. It’s not like he wasn’t aware that Mac worried about him; he’s known as much since John found that gun lock hidden in the dogs’ food. But hearing verbal confirmation that she fears he might commit suicide is a very different matter. “Mackenzie,” Evan says very slowly and clearly, putting a hand around the back of her neck. “I promise I’m not going to do that. I would never leave you alone like that.”

“You don’t know that!” Mac says. “You wouldn’t even be going to counseling if John didn’t make you.”

Mac’s got him dead to rights there, but Evan thinks he deserves just a little bit of credit for seeking out the only person on the planet who could possibly inspire him to get his shit together, particularly since he had to sacrifice the remains of his pride and dignity in order to ask to stay with him. “But he _did_ make me, and I _am_ going,” he says. “See, that’s why we’re in St. Louis.”

“That is _so not_ why we’re in St. Louis, and this is exactly what I’m talking about! You always leave out the most important part of the story! I know John isn’t just your buddy from OIF. Grown-ups who are just buddies don’t sleep in the same bed together.”

Evan recoils as if slapped. “How the hell did you even know about that?”

“I told you I’m not stupid! And I check on you sometimes to make sure you’re not sleeping with your gun again like a PTSD psycho!”

“Watch your language!”

 _“You_ watch your language! And you don’t need to get all wigged out at me. I’m old enough to keep a secret.”

“That’s not —” Evan cuts himself off in frustration, scrubbing his hand over his head again. “That’s not what I’m wigged out about. And you don’t have to keep anything a secret.”

Mac glares at him. “Dad. Something you don’t tell anyone, not even your own kid, is, like, the literal definition of a secret.”

Evan stares through the windshield and counts seconds as he exhales, a calming strategy that doesn’t do much for him. If he’s honest, he isn’t particularly prepared to have the PTSD talk with Mac, even though Erica has encouraged him to plan what he’s going to say to her about it. He’s sure as shit not prepared to have the gay talk — Erica doesn’t even know about that situation. Maybe if he’d nutted up and told her she’d have given him some pointers. She’s technically bound by patient confidentiality. There’s no way Evan’s outing himself to the crowd of angry ex-marines and soldiers in his group sessions, though.

“Mackenzie, what do you think PTSD is?” Evan asks, looking back at his daughter.

Mac gives him an _I’m-so-smart-and-know-everything_ look. “It’s when you come back from war all messed up and you hate fireworks and need to sit in the corner at restaurants and wig out if someone sneaks up behind you and if it gets really bad you could hurt other people or yourself.”

“Okay,” Evan says. “Why do you think I need to sit in the corner?”

“Sight lines,” Mac says automatically.

“But why do I need those?”

Mac shrugs. “You just do.”

Evan takes another deep breath. “It’s because when you’re in a combat situation, you need to be hyper aware of your entire AO at all times. You need to be able to see if some stranger takes out a cell phone, because they could be using it to trigger an explosive device. So, you see, learning to be hypervigilant was a good strategy that kept me alive.”

“I don’t mind letting you have the corner seat,” Mac says.

“That’s not what I’m trying to say, Skipper,” Evan says, frustrated as usual with his inability to find the right words. “I’m trying to say that back there and back then, it was a good strategy. But stateside, it’s not a good strategy anymore. It stops me from doing normal stuff, and sometimes it scares other people. It makes me scared all the time, too. But it’s hard to just quit doing something that kept me alive for a long time. I’m trying. But it’s really hard.”

“Okay,” Mac says. “As long as John keeps your gun.”

Evan actually has to close his eyes to get the next part out, and he kind of feels like he’s walking unarmed into hostile territory as he does it, even though the only other person here is Mac, so that’s completely stupid. “The thing with John is kind of the same. When I was growing up, in my house with my mom and stepdad, in my school, in my neighborhood, and then later, in the Marines, if anyone guessed I was gay, it would have been really bad. I woulda gotten kicked out of the house, beat up, fired. So I got really good at pretending it wasn’t true, and that kept me safe for a long time. It’s hard to quit, like the hyper vigilance stuff. But it’s not a good strategy anymore, either. So I’m trying to quit that, too.”

Mac takes a moment to think about this. “I don’t care that you’re gay, as long as it’s with John. I like him.”

Evan laughs, more to release desperate tension than anything else. “I like him, too.”

“Does that mean we can stay living with him forever?”

“I can’t make you a promise like that, kiddo, ‘cause I don’t know if I could keep it, but I’m gonna try. I hope so.”

Mac nods. Another moment of silence stretches past the minute mark, and then she says, “Can we go home now?”

“Sure, Skipper,” Evan says. “Let’s go home.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry to all of you who were hoping for some good, old-fashioned tooth rotting fluff in the epilogue after I dragged you through 40k words of angst and dysfunction. You 100% deserved it, I tried to deliver it, but apparently that’s not how I roll. 
> 
> I CANNOT BELIEVE I FINALLY FINISHED THIS MONSTER. Thanks so much to everyone who helped me with it, particularly Lake for beta-ing and SDS, not only for beta-ing parts of this, but also for reading SO MANY VERSIONS of a Tear Down the House sequel over the years before Mac finally materialized and demanded a story. And thanks so much to all three or four of you who have been reading this!


End file.
